Amy Poehler Admits to Some ‘Inappropriate’ SNL Roles

Amy Poehler has some regrets about her time on Saturday Night Live.

On the June 17 episode of her podcast Good Hang, Poehler, 53, reunited with her SNL costar Will Forte. Poehler starred on SNL from 2001 to 2008 and also served as a co-anchor of Weekend Update for her last four years. Forte, 55, starred on the show from 2002 to 2010.

During their chat, the conversation turned to some of their less savory SNL jokes, including pranks behind the scenes. “There are so many things I look back now and I go — you think, ‘Oh, it’s all about getting a laugh,’ ” Forte said of his time working the series.

“Agree,” Poehler said. “The part about getting older and being in comedy, is you have to figure out everything has an expiration date.”

Then the Parks & Recreation star remembered an In Memoriam segment for the “canceled and tasteless jokes of its past” that SNL played during its 50th anniversary celebration. 

“They had that segment, which was like, ‘Here’s all the ways we got things wrong,’ ” Poehler said. “And they showed way inappropriate casting for people. We all played people that we should not have played.”

“I misappropriated. I appropriated. I didn’t know. I did know,” she said. “It’s very real, and the best thing you can do is make repair, learn from your mistakes, do better — it’s all you can do.”

The In Memoriam was introduced by Tom Hanks, who noted it included “characters, accents and let’s just call them ethnic wigs” that were “unquestionably in poor taste” and joked that the audience laughed at them and ought to be the ones “cancelled.” Poehler only appeared once in the montage, when she walked into the screen and yelled, “Oh my God, Ben Affleck just yelled at that mentally challenged guy!”

Some of Poehler’s more questionable impressions from her time on SNL included Michael Jackson (five times), Kim Jong-il (three times), and Yoko Ono (once). She also played a character named Amber, a one-legged reality star. Forte’s more troubling impressions have included judge Lance Ito and former Chinese president Hu Jintao.

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Back in February, Poehler opened up about how her time on SNL still affects her, and not always positively. “I was just thinking about this the other day — how late we stayed up, and we would all have to stay up all night for writing night, which is that Tuesday night [before the show],” she said on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. 

“Still, on a Tuesday night sometimes, I get a stomachache,” she added.