Ashley Padilla Has a Convincing Defense for Making Fart Jokes on ‘SNL’

The most recent episode of Saturday Night Live featured host and musical guest Sabrina Carpenter, but the real star may have been a prolonged, voluminous fart.

In the most flatulent sketch of the night, Ashley Padilla plays an office employee whose co-workers throw her a surprise birthday party that, oddly, has absolutely no decorations or snacks. But as soon as they shout “surprise,” the woman lets out the loudest, wettest fart this side of The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.

She then proceeds to blame the group for the toot-inducing shock. And the farts don’t end there…

Fart-based humor is obviously nothing new for SNL, as evidenced by the time they re-staged Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but with Jason Sudeikis as Jimmy Stewart and January Jones as a surprisingly gassy Grace Kelly.

This wasn’t even the first fart sketch of 2025. In January, the show gave us a sketch in which Timothee Chalamet plays a doctor who farts into an elderly woman’s mouth in order to revive her. 

Still, a lot of viewers seemingly weren’t impressed that the show devoted an entire sketch to one woman’s farting struggles (although people still praised Padilla’s commitment to the bit).

As Padilla just revealed to writer Evan Ross Katz, she had reservations about the sketch prior to the performance, but was reassured by a fellow cast member. “I was scared that it was too juvenile and that the audience would hate it and maybe even think less of me for it,” she recalled. “I told Andrew Dismukes how nervous I was while we were waiting for another sketch to begin. ‘Everybody loves a fart joke,’ he said. ‘Everybody.’”

When asked about why farts are so funny despite being “juvenile,” Padilla convincingly argued that fart jokes are more pertinent today than ever before, thanks to social media. 

“We live in a culture that constantly needs and wants to be perceived as ‘put together,’” she explained. “We post our best shots on Instagram. We don’t use the guy we’re dating’s bathroom before we’ve been dating for quite some time, as if we are somehow tricking him into thinking we’ve never shit in our lives. We are constantly in control of our image. Constantly in control of how others look at us. So how funny is it, that you can do your makeup, curl your hair, be the hottest bitch in the fucking world and then a horn sound, with the stench of feces, can come out of your butt within the matter of one second and ruin the entire thing. That is what I find funny.”

This would have made for a terrific acceptance speech if he Emmys had “Best Fart” award.