Don Roy King | Xanax for Summer Gay Weddings / 2013

the little blue pill

by Douglas Messerli

 

Seth Meyers and Colin Jost (screenwriters), Don Roy King (director) Xanax for Summer Gay Weddings / 2013

 

This charmingly silly Saturday Night Live short from May 18, 2013, featuring Cecily Strong, Bill Hader, Bobby Moynihan, Vanessa Bayer, begins with what appears to be an advertisement, wondering if you suffer from feelings of anxiety or feel that you never will be good enough? If so, the ad suggests, you must have been invited to a “beautiful gay wedding.”

 

    Actor Bill Hader does indeed look troubled as does another woman (Cecily Strong).

    Finally we are told the point of the ad, that there is, thankfully, a new drug, Xanex for Gay Summer Weddings, the only medicine that relieves the stress of “spectacular gay summer weddings.”

     One user (Bobby Moynihan) declares that he used to be anxious that he wouldn’t have the right thing to wear, but now can enjoy everyone’s “immaculate pastel suit.” He admits he doesn’t even own an iron.

     Hader’s character says that usually at weddings he’s the best dancer there. But at the gay weddings he’s attended everyone knows a choreographed number to a Beyoncé song that hasn’t even been released.   

    A woman (Vanessa Bell) relates that at her wedding she gave her guests Cheez-it and bottled water, Keith and William gave us two tickets to Italy and 40,000 dollars.

     Another complains that everything on their registry has to be shipped from France, so that she needed to sneak in her gift when they weren’t looking.

     Another male (also played Hader) mentions that Barak Obama sent the gay couple his personal congratulations. My grandmother called Obama the “N-word” in her toast.

     There is a final recommendation to take Xanax for all Gay Summer Weddings, with a mention that it’s necessary for Lesbian summer weddings, which shows a poorly dressed lesbian couple holding the leash to numerous pet dogs.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (June 2004).