Saturday Night Live Sketch Mocking Tourette's Gets a Community Note

You might have heard about this incident about a week ago. It happened at the British version of the Oscars, the BAFTA Awards. A movie about Tourette's syndrome won three awards, and they brought on a man with Tourette's named John Davidson, who stepped up to the microphone and uttered a racial slur as black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage. The BBC apologized for airing the slurs, and Davidson told Variety, "I remember there was a microphone just in front of me, and with hindsight I have to question whether this was wise, so close to where I was seated, knowing I would tic."

Host Alan Cumming apologized and thanked the audience for their understanding, saying, "Tourette's syndrome is a disability and the tics you have heard tonight are involuntary, which means the person who has Tourette's syndrome has no control over their language. We apologize if you were offended." Davidson said he was "deeply mortified" and left the auditorium early.

The great comic minds at Saturday Night Live thought that was rich material for a sketch about people getting away with saying offensive things, like J.K. Rowling blurting out that if you have a penis, you're not a woman. SNL must have thought the skit was pretty good, as they posted it to X.

brought to you by the national workforce of rethinking disabilities pic.twitter.com/F5Fj1wpPhJ
— Saturday Night Live (@nbcsnl) March 1, 2026

Tourette's organizations didn't think the skit was too funny, and SNL got hit with a Community Note:

Readers added context they thought people might want to know

John Davidson suffers from a very rare form of Tourettes called coprolalia in which he involuntarily, shouts out the most offensive thing possible in a situation. It is a real illness and mocking him for it is deeply inappropriate and cruel.

I haven't watched Saturday Night Live since Chris Farley was on, so I only see the most cringeworthy excerpts, like "Hillary Clinton" singing "Hallelujah" after her election loss, or two of the cast members singing "To Sir, With Love" to a portrait of Barack Obama.

Crazy how South Park had a full episode on Tourette’s 20 years ago.

And they were drastically funnier, with also showing respect towards the Tourette’s community.

This isn’t funny at all, and just punches down. Just a complete swing and a miss
— Lowest Common Idiots (@LowestComIdiots) March 1, 2026

It just goes to show that "progressive" means only signalling your virtues and pretending to support disabled people. The minute a real one shows up, and you see how messy disability is, you lose all sympathy and mock him for something he can't control. Pathetic.
— GrouchyRemarx (@GrouchyRemarx) March 1, 2026

Someone on this site immediately put this situation into context: either the leftist establishment sides with disabled people or black people seething about disabled people. For a second I almost couldn’t believe the latter would happen, but here it is.
— Shadow (post-Time Prison) (@bii_dan) March 2, 2026

Wow! Is that what "progressives" think is funny? I guess you have to be right sort of marginalised group, eh? Gross.
— Pagan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@Pagan5242) March 1, 2026

That skit wasn't very woke, coming from people who lectured us about pointing out President Joe Biden's lifelong "stutter." They let him get away with lying an awful lot, claiming it was a stutter. And his dismal debate performance? His stutter.

For a culture that goes to great lengths to avoid offending anyone, wokeism apparently decides that Tourette’s is rare enough, weird enough, and inadvertently offensive enough, that they can pick on it. Hypocrites.
— Fernando Sanchez (@fsanchez1983) March 1, 2026

SNL has an entire writers' room, and no one realized this was in bad taste?

And as plenty of people pointed out, the impressions were so bad that the people had to tell you who they were trying to imitate.

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