Mary Brown was sipping coffee at home in Ontario, Calif., Sunday morning when a friend sent a video clip that ruined her breakfast.
It contained a skit from “Saturday Night Live” the night before about the new gene therapies for sickle cell disease. In it, workers gather for an office white-elephant-style gift exchange. A white employee, played by Kate McKinnon, gives a Black employee with sickle cell, played by Kenan Thompson, enrollment in “Vertex Pharmaceutical and CRISPR Therapeutics’ exa-cel program for sickle cell anemia,” explaining that it was a cure and she had an in with the company to get ahead on the waiting list.
Thompson thanks McKinnon, hugs her, and then, to audience laughter, explains, “I’m just going to swap this out for a Boogie Woogie Santa” — a singing, trumpet-playing Santa figurine. Another white employee gets the cure, but explains he or a family member won’t be able to use it because “my whole family is white.”
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Brown, the longtime director of the Sickle Cell Disease Foundation, was irate.
“To see sickle cell as a joke — it was very distressing,” she said. “I have seen people die. I have been to too many funerals.”
Brown was far from alone. The sketch reverberated around the sickle cell community the next morning. To many advocates, patients, and doctors, it seemed to perpetuate falsehoods and stereotypes that had harmed sickle cell patients and held back progress for decades: that sickle cell was strictly a “Black disease”; that patients didn’t or couldn’t make responsible decisions about their own disease — and would, for example, choose a Santa toy over a curative therapy.
See, iiiidk bout this one. On one hand I can see people feeling like their struggles are being made light of, but that’s kinda what comedy does. SOMEONE is going to end up upset about something you said when you make a sketch around things like a desease. I think the laugh was supposed to come from the absurdity that comes with the idea of someone actually choosing the boogie santa over a thing like CRISPR. I really doubt SNL is out here looking to make a statement like “black people would dumbly choose Santa over medical care.” This seems like a lot of people kinda overreacting to me. I don’t even really see the joke they made as funny necessarily, but I definitely don’t think it was some mean spirited message about black people.
My disease/condition is the only unjokeable one
Edit: if Michael J Fox can make and handle jokes about his Parkinson’s, I think these folks can lighten up a little. I’m sure it does suck but his damn brain’s dopamine neurons are dying which will eventually make him a vegatable, taking offence and being negative won’t help anything.
Agreed. I read it as the absurdity that she would assume the black coworker had sickle cell just because he’s black—which is why he traded it for a gift he would actually enjoy.
No, he actually had sickle cell.
Ahh ok. I didn’t see the actual skit so I got that wrong.