Oh baby. You’d think lugging around a developing human being for nine months would be plenty of work on its own. But history has shown us it’s possible to be pregnant and perform stellar sketch comedy right up until the day you give birth.
Here are five funny cast members and hosts who proved that pregnancy and Saturday Night Live can be a fertile combination…
Amy Poehler
Poehler was pregnant when she performed her famous Hillary Clinton/Tina Fey sketch with Tina Fey. “When we were doing the sketch, Archie was doing somersaults in my stomach,” she says in Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, “I was thinking, ‘Wow, he knows this is really exciting.’”
Archie was almost the first kid born on Saturday Night Live. Poehler rehearsed on Friday the week that Jon Hamm hosted for the first time — the same day that she learned that her baby doctor passed away unexpectedly.
“I was due the next day. So it’s my first kid, I’m in a Mad Men outfit, I turn to everybody and I hysterically start crying, and a really pregnant woman crying is terrifying,” she told an audience, as reported by Vulture. “And Jon Hamm, who I am just getting to know, comes over and puts his hands on my shoulder and is like, ‘This is a really important show for me. I’m gonna need you to get your shit together.’ And I laughed so hard, I probably peed myself.” (She gave birth on Saturday just hours before Hamm’s big show.)
Keke Palmer
Palmer was the first performer to announce her pregnancy on Saturday Night Live. People were already speculating so why not? “You need a certain level of physicality to do SNL,” she told Vanity Fair. “It was so much fun to say it during my monologue. That’s something my kid can have forever.”
Maya Rudolph
The day Rudolph had to tell Lorne Michaels she was pregnant was the day she stopped being afraid of him. “Lorne always made me nervous because I always wanted to be a good girl in front of him,” she says in Live from New York. “But once I had to go into his office and tell him I was pregnant — which was, weirdly, a month after Tina (Fey) had to do the same thing — everything about our relationship changed.”
Michaels’ biggest concern? “I can’t believe I just let you fall through a wire foam piano last week.”
Kerry Washington
Washington pulled some old sitcom tricks the week she hosted while pregnant, such as wearing boxy outfits and hiding behind chairs while playing Michelle Obama. And Oprah Winfrey. And Beyonce. That was SNL’s awkward way of acknowledging it had no Black women in its cast, a circumstance that’s thankfully been rectified in her kid’s lifetime.
Tina Fey
In 2005, Fey decided she needed to build a bridge to the future. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to try to write this movie Mean Girls, I’m going to pitch a sitcom and I’m going to try to get pregnant and we’ll just see what sticks.’ And all three things overlapped,” she remembers in Live From New York. (She was pregnant with her oldest during the last part of Season 30.) “When my daughter was born in September 2005, I got six weeks off, and then I went back a couple shows in. I remember that season thinking, ‘Why am I here?’ I remember sitting at the read-through table, listening to like the 28th sketch out of 40 and thinking, ‘My baby is at home. I gotta get out of here. I can’t do this.’”
While Fey did leave, she returned to host pregnant once more during Season 36, appearing on stage with an equally expecting Maya Rudolph.
