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SNL’s 21 Cecily Strongest Moments

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos Courtesy of Saturday Night Live/YouTube

When Cecily Strong joined the cast of SNL in the summer of 2012, she hit the Studio 8H ground running like few have in the history of the show. Three months in, she had already established four recurring characters. She just deeply understood how to do Saturday Night Live — it was clear then and continued to be throughout her beloved run. She could play small in a big way, be broad while staying grounded, and sing like a million angels. But more than anything else, when she was in character, Strong was committed. SNL rewards performers who let their real selves cheat through the character a little (if not full-on break), but Strong remained precisely as deep in character as each sketch demanded. This precision, as well as her comedic flexibility, made her a performer the writers loved to work with (to say nothing of the many sketches she wrote herself). After 11 seasons on the show and two Emmy nominations, Strong will be remembered as a real sketch comedian’s sketch comedian. From Melania Trump to a clown who had an abortion when she was 23, what follows are 21 moments that offer but a glimpse into how freaking great she was on SNL.

1.

“Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party” (Various)

Take it away, Seth Meyers: “I’ll never forget the first time she did GIRL AT THE PARTY… in her rookie season. It was self-assured and unflappable in a way that takes most of us years (if we’re lucky!) and when she checked her phone making both me and the audience wait it took my breath away.”

2.

“Girlfriend’s Talk Show” (Various)

While “Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party” put Strong on people’s radar, it felt like her first “my boyfriend’s crazy” run in the first “Girlfriend’s Talk Show” sketch was when it became clear how good she was going to be on SNL. The way she says “awesome” — so sweetly yet secretly dismissively — is just so funny.

3.

“Swarvoski Crystals” (December 2012)

Why is Strong’s unnamed former porn star so funny? Is it the way she pronounces the names of luxury brands, let alone words like “luzzury,” as she tries to be a high-end spokesperson? Is it her unparalleled benzo-acting? Or is it her ridiculous tangents that hint at a colorful, scary past life? It’s the way she’s able to deliver all of the above while turning off the light behind her eyes: uproarious, disaffected, and just tragic enough. She’s the queen ditz in Strong’s stable of scarred women. Thanks, Sabovski Crissals!

4.

“Barnes and Noble Firing” (March 2013)

Some SNL sketches build to a place of wackiness. Others just come in hot. Strong and Bobby Moynihan’s recurring Dana and Niff sketches always start with the two of them at a ten, burning bridges and delivering elaborate roasts of their co-workers and letting Strong go full aggro (or her version of it, which is still something like 10 percent theater kid). It’s a disgruntled-retail death dream.

5.

“Blue River Dog Food” (April 2014)

This is one of a number of sketches over the years that basically functioned as excuses for Strong to hold a pug, so points for that. But unlike “Court Show” and “Dog Infomercial,” this commercial parody featured Strong playing things completely straight as a wife on the brink of a complete nervous breakdown. Most committed is the moment when she just gets up and walks over to face the wall, letting the audience sit in a few seconds of dead air and trusting we’ll follow her wherever this goes. It’s like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but a dog-food ad.

6.

“Serial: The Christmas Surprise” (December 2014)

Take it away, Laraine Newman: “There have been so many extraordinary players on SNL. The list is long, but Cecily Strong — her characters are so nuanced, original and hilarious … please find the sketch that parodies the Serial podcast. I hope you can recognize what’s extraordinary about it.” Apart from Strong’s impersonation being sonically spot-on, her version of Sarah Koenig is so lived-in that it makes the world of the sketch feel three-dimensional, allowing for the juxtaposition of subjects (murder podcast and Santa, in this case) to be that much more heightened.

7.

“Dinner Date” (March 2015)

One time, we were interviewing a very famous former SNL writer a year after they left the show and they started the conversation asking if we’d watched the most recent episode. They proceeded to talk about this sketch and how they wished they could’ve pitched jokes for it, because it was so good. God Save the Queen (Gemma).

8.

“Christmas Sing Along” (December 2015)

Strong found an excuse to sing and dance in a sketch whenever she got the chance, infusing the show with a cabaret sensibility that puts the “variety” in SNL’s Variety Sketch Series Emmys. Many of these bits revolved around her belting a standard that is extremely specific and strange to everyone around her (until, twist, it isn’t). In this case, it’s “Debra’s Time,” a vague take on “Rose’s Turn” that Strong takes to the next level with numerous spoken-word interludes delivered totally in character and lots of stage-slapping. It helps that Strong’s got pipes. 

9.

“Wells for Boys” (December 2016)

After Bill Hader left SNL in 2013, Strong became the go-to cast member to do commercial-parody voice-overs. There were some sketches, like “President Barbie,” in which her voice was tasked with carrying the whole thing. But we think her work on “Wells for Boys” is really special. Her voice had to shift to capture the change in tone while maintaining the reality of a commercial voice-over.

10.

“Cathy Anne” (December 2016)

This was not the first Cathy Anne appearance, but it’s maybe the best — just for how Strong throws away the word crack. Like with how she says “awesome,” Strong is so skilled at getting the most out of one word. It’s notable that she was equally adept at doing “Weekend Update” with Colin Jost or Michael Che (not to mention Seth Meyers).

11.

“Melania Moments” (February 2017)

When Trump came on the political scene, everyone at SNL was enlisted to do their part. Thankfully, there was a brunette woman in the family! Strong would play the former First Lady more than 20 times (including once alongside Trump himself), but she was never better than in these little runners, in which she brought Julio Torres’s silly, sad, sinister Melania tweets to life.

12.

“Italian Restaurant” (October 2017)

More than anything else, Strong’s expertise is playing tragically loud, dumb bitches — the most confident messes with long dark hair or roots-showing blondes. The woman whose favorite restaurant is Terrazano’s (Pizza Hut) and favorite coffee is Domenico’s (Burger King) is maybe the pinnacle of the form. Every single sentence she says in every one of these is so funny.

13.

“Girlfriends Game Night” (March 2018)

For how precise or grounded Strong’s character work tends to be, she proved to be a carefree, albeit idiosyncratic, physical comedian on the show. She understood that in some sketches, the character just needed to be enough to hold the thing together while she flops around with the host. “Girlfriends Game Night” is maybe the most famous, but “Santa’s Village” and “Love at First Sight” must be mentioned as well — if only because of the potential injury risk.

14.

“New Wife” (November 2017)

Strong’s best impressions are unspoken but just as effective regardless of whether you get the reference. Her (pre-criminal) Erika Jayne, played as “either 18 or 55” and powered by gay fandom, has something for everyone. Out called it “the gayest Saturday Night Live sketch ever” (this was pre–“Sara Lee”). Others know it as “the one that made Larry David break.”

15.

“Chantix Commercial” (January 2018)

One of Strong’s stock talents is “woman who has lost the plot and given up on her dream.” In “Chantix Commercial,” she tries to prove to the disembodied voice-over in a “real people, not actors” pharmaceutical ad that she can still be an actor — it’s not too late! Sweaty desperation, pathos, and some very bad accent work ensue.

16.

“Irish Dating Show” (March 2018)

Sketches like these show off what made Strong such a valuable utility player to the SNL cast: She commits to the accent more than anyone else does, and she plays the role of flirty cousin guilelessly enough to give an otherwise offensive sketch a light tone that allows it to (just barely) get away with jokes about incest, deformity, and stereotypes.

17.

“Jingle Bells” (December 2018)

Photo: Saturday Night Live

One of Strong’s most endearing and unique traits among SNL players is how her artistic sensibility often overlaps with that of an old drag queen. She has a passion for playing brassy broads who live for the stage and has an enthusiasm for culty, campy pop-culture-reference-based sketches like this one, which isn’t even a pastiche or parody, just the definitive cover performance of Barbra Streisand’s bonkers “Jingle Bells.” (Watch it here.)

18.

“Jeanine Pirro” (March 2019)

A tour de force. This is as good as an SNL performance gets. Strong fully embodies Pirro to such a degree that she allows for the most absurd physical moments to not break the reality. Across 11 seasons on SNL, Pirro was Cecily’s drunkest mess, her messiest drunk, and probably her greatest work.

19.

“The Science Room” (January 2020)

Strong says a lot of fun stuff as this dumb little kid, but this series of sketches is here because of the faces she makes. You’d know exactly who this dumb little kid is even if the audio were removed.

20.

“Michigan Hearings Cold Open” (December 2020)

When Rudy Giuliani first introduced the world to his star witness, election denier Melissa Carone, Strong trended on Twitter. It was the exact type of person Strong found herself embodying every week since the 2016 election, as Trump’s Republican Party started putting forth more and more messy, possibly drunk, dumb, loud, bitchy women. All the impressions — be they of Carone, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Kimberly Guilfoyle — are different, but in their similarities, a story about modern politics is told.

21.

“Goober the Clown” (November 2021)

One of Strong’s last great “Weekend Update” appearances was her most personal and one of the show’s best political segments in years. “I could have dressed as myself, but I was dressing as a clown because it wouldn’t have felt comfortable to just be myself,” Strong said later about her performance as “Goober the Clown, who had an abortion the day before her 23rd birthday.” This segment aired after Texas’s dangerous abortion bans and months before the disastrous Roe v. Wade overturn, and Strong keeps things “light” doing silly surface-level clown stuff while speaking frankly about how one in three clowns have abortions but are scared to talk about them and she “wouldn’t be a clown on TV here today” without safe abortion access. “The last thing anyone wants is a bunch of dead clowns in a dark alley,” she says in a helium voice. Scary on many levels.

SNL’s 21 Cecily Strongest Moments