When a credit is due, we ought to take it, and she definitely did.
Quinta Brunson pokes fun at the iconic 90’s TV sitcom “Friends” for not having any black characters and for its absence of diversity in her introduction for “Saturday Night Live.” Quinta made her “SNL” debut this weekend.
The winner of an Emmy Award for her work on the series “Abbott Elementary,” who also has a starring role in the comedy, was the most recent celebrity to host the US sketch show. Brunson addressed the success of her series during the opening monologue that she delivered on Saturday.
The series follows a group of educators working at a predominately Black school in Philadelphia that receives inadequate funding. She joked, “I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live back in the day, but the audition process seemed long. So instead of trying to get on SNL, I created my TV show, made sure it became trendy, won a bunch of Emmys, and then got asked to host.”
The next thing that Bunson did was characterize “Abbott Elementary” by comparing it to the sitcom “Friends” from the 1990s. She said: “It’s a network sitcom like Friends. Rather than focusing on a group of close companions, it centers on a group of educators. Instead of New York, it’s in Philadelphia, and instead of being devoid of black people, it has some.”
Brunson’s remark was met with applause and cheers from the audience as the multi-talented celebrity smiled playfully. In recent years, “Friends” has come under fire for only featuring non-white actors in substantially more minor roles than white actors.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, co-creator Marta Kauffman acknowledged the criticism, saying, “It took me a long time to begin to understand how I internalized systemic racism.” As a direct result, Kauffman contributed $4 million to the department of African and African American studies at Brandeis University, where she had previously completed her education.
At the same time, in an interview with The Daily Beast, Lisa Kudrow, who portrayed Phoebe in the series, they have appeared to defend Kaufman and her co-creator David Crane. Kudrow said, “Well, it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college. They have no right to write stories about the experiences of being a person of color because they have not lived those experiences.”
In addition, Jennifer Aniston, who plays Rachel on “Friends,” stated earlier this week that a generation of kids now finds the show offensive.
James Austin Johnson reprised his role as Donald Trump during another segment of Saturday Night Live and used the opportunity to make fun of the former president just a few days after he was arrested on charges of falsifying business records. In the meantime, co-host Michael Che played a prank on Colin Jost, which the latter called the meanest thing Che has ever done.