Why ‘SNL’s Dirtiest Digital Short Was Allowed to Air Uncensored
While many of Saturday Night Live’s Digital Shorts involved innocent boat trips and The Chronicles of Narnia, some were quite risqué, such as “Dick in a Box,” the recent “Sushi Glory Hole,” and the one in which Tom Hanks begged people not to mutilate his testicles through song.
But the filthiest Digital Short of all time may have been 2008’s “Jizz in My Pants,” the music video starring The Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone as two suave guys who can’t help but prematurely ejaculate — whether it’s because they’re making out with a hot stranger at a club, or simply finding out that Bruce Willis was a ghost at the end of The Sixth Sense.
If you’re surprised that this bodily fluid-filled sketch made it to the air, well, so are the guys who made it.
On the most recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, the trio revealed that they fully anticipated that Lorne Michaels wouldn’t be okay with the uncensored version of the song, and readied an alternate cut. Taccone himself preferred the version that censored the word “jizz” because there were “potentially kids watching this show.”
According to Akiva Schaffer, the group “asked Lorne to watch (“Jizz in My Pants”) way earlier than he would ever watch any other short.” And, importantly, the video was already completed because it was fully funded by the Lonely Island’s record label. This meant it looked good and clearly “cost money,” but it wasn’t SNL’s money.
After presenting the finished video to Michaels, the guys pointed out that they were working on a “clean version” that could safely air on NBC, “and he was like, ‘Yeah, I want to air it. And it can air like that. It doesn’t need to be a clean version. That’s fine. Jizz is fine,’” Schaffer recalled. “And we were like ‘What? Is it?’”
This was especially surprising considering that SNL had previously bleeped the word “Dick” when “Dick in a Box” aired. “To me (‘Jizz’) was a dirtier word than ‘Dick,’” Schaffer argued.
Despite Michaels’ approval, SNL censor Betzy Torres said “absolutely not” to the jizz-based song, “and we were like, ‘we sort of agree with you.,” Taccone claimed. But the issue eventually made its way to then-NBC President Jeff Zucker, who okayed the uncensored cut under the condition that it could only air after 12:30 a.m. This explains why “Jizz in My Pants” was the second-to-last sketch of the episode.
Meyers suggested that there’s a non-zero chance that Michaels and Zucker didn’t actually understand what “jizz” means. “What are the odds that Lorne and Jeff had this conversation: ‘Jizz means piss, right?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah I think so.’”
And apparently “multiple parents” had to have in-depth conversations about human sexuality with kids who saw the video but didn’t get the joke, arguably making it a “useful teaching tool.”
At least those conversations were likely way easier than the ones inspired by “Motherlover.”
