How SNL Mocks Gendered Ads

In the Saturday Night Live skit and mock-advertisement entitled "President Barbie," three young girls are shown playing with a variety of toys. The narration of the ad starts with generic background about the girls being able to do whatever they want as long as they use their imagination. Their original interests are not specifically gendered in the beginning: one girl plays with Legos, another draws a map to a castle, and the last girl dreams of going to space.

Then the narrator announces the product they are advertising, a Barbie doll that resembles Hillary Clinton and is named President Barbie. The girls are given the doll, promptly pass it off as boring, and continue playing with their preferred toys, much to the narrator's displeasure. As the narrator attempts to pass the doll off as empowering because of its image as the first female president, one of the girls retorts, "Yeah, but girls don't have to play with dolls, we can play with whatever we want."

The first and most obvious technique found in this skit (and the majority of other SNL works) is parody. In this case, it is a parody of children's toy commercials that encourage gender stereotypes like girls playing with dolls and princesses and boys playing with trucks and Legos. The skit is satire because it imitates the children's cartoon with the goal of making it clear how ridiculous the commercials are. Another aspect of advertising that the skit is making fun of is how toy brands will make toys that are still gendered but say they are about female empowerment. Like in this ad, the product is meant to empower girls by making them picture a woman or themselves as president, but in the parody, it comes off as still forcing girls to play with dolls. By making fun of these ads, SNL makes it clear they believe that kids shouldn't be forced to play with gendered toys because of some upbeat commercial that makes it seem like that's the only way they can have fun.

The second technique is the situational irony of the skit due to the interaction between the narrator and the girls in it. In a traditional ad, the expectation that is set up is that the narrator would talk about the toy, and the children or people in the ad would get excited about the toy and then play with it and have fun for the cameras. But in order to criticize how society structures these gendered ads, the girls in the ad flip the script by refusing to play with President Barbie and insisting they are more empowered to play with whatever they choose than to have gender so blatantly forced upon them.