“Saturday Night Live” alum Punkie Johnson said she used to cause chaos around the studio by wearing a fake penis under her dresses and skirts during sketches, much to the chagrin of boss Lorne Michaels.
The comedian dished about her “dick” during a recent stand-up performance detailed by Entertainment Weekly, explaining that donning a strap-on helped her deal with having gotten “soft” during her time on “SNL.”
“Motherfuckers got me in these dresses. I ain’t never seen myself like this before,” she joked. “Touching on Michael B. Jordan! I’m like, hold on, Punkie! Bitch, you’re tripping!”
So, in order to, as Johnson put it, “maintain my dyke-ism, I had to come up with a plan,” which was to put “my dick on in 30 Rock.”
Johnson, who became the cast’s first out queer Black cast member when she joined in 2020, revealed that she wore her faux phallus “all through” the revered Studio 8H and said people could even catch a glimpse of her imitation bulge if they go back and watch the tape.
“Yeah, I fucking did it,” she laughed. “I don’t know if y’all paid attention to SNL, but if you go back and look at the reruns, you’ll see it poking on the dresses I was wearing.”
Though Michaels was apparently not a fan of Johnson’s anatomical antics, it didn’t stop her from the penis pranks.
“Lorne would get mad. He’d be like, ‘Punkie, you can’t wear your dick on NBC,’” she remembered. “I don’t give a fuck, Lorne. I’m keeping my dick on!”
Johnson took her final bow at “SNL” in 2024, later looking back on the experience as a sink-or-swim environment that was hard to explain to outsiders.
“It’s very hard to understand a place like that. They just throw you in the water — you better know how to swim. They don’t give you no life jacket,” Johnson said during her farewell party at the time.