Starlight’s Story ‘The Boys’ Inspired by Cecily Strong’s ‘SNL’ Clown Sketch

Warning: this article contains spoilers The boys season 4, episode 4, “The Wisdom of the Ages.”

Cecily Strong’s Goober the Clown song on the 47th season of Saturday Night Live continues to speak volumes three years later.

According to The boys showrunner Eric Kripke, the sketch was a big inspiration for the Starlight/Annie January reveal in season 4’s “Wisdom of the Ages.” In the episode airing on Prime Video this week, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) makes another below-the-belt attempt to sully Annie’s name. With Vought’s support, she hosted an hour-long live event that resulted in Annie’s medical records being revealed and her abortion publicly revealed.

After severely beating Firecracker for pulling such a cheap and invasive stunt, Annie has a conversation with Hughie (Jack Quaid) about how she was agonized over the decision, about how they weren’t ready for a child, and how she now has to relive that moment every time someone talks to her about it. “It’s only your business,” Hughie told him.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade was happening in real time as we wrote, so it was definitely on everyone’s mind,” Kripke said. Weekly Entertainment. “But another inspiration for us was Cecily Strong.”

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Strong appeared on “Weekend Update” on SNL season 47 as Goober the Clown as a way to talk about his own abortion while doing “funny clown stuff” to make the conversation “more palatable.”

“Who is Cecily? My name is Goober!” she says in the sketch. “I wish I didn’t have to do this because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business, but that’s all some people in this country want to discuss all the time, even whether clown abortion was legalized in the 1973 Clown v. Wade case.

“That really moved me,” Kripke recalled of watching the sketch. “What I think we were really trying to get across (about The boys) that’s how common it is, and yet so few women can talk about it. So we said, “Let’s leave it there and sort it out.” »

The writers’ room tried to treat Annie’s storyline as realistically as possible, despite it being set in the exaggerated world of supes. “We’ve spoken to a lot of women who have had abortions, but the main thing we wanted to get across was that it’s not a particularly massive, dramatic thing. It’s something that thousands and thousands of people experience. thousands of women,” continues Kripke. “We just wanted to normalize that a little bit. If in a big genre series you can talk about it without it being the most upsetting, apocalyptic moment, but it’s a difficult moment that a woman went through and then moved on living life, we thought there was value in that perspective, a perspective that is almost never present in television or film.”