Ego Nwodim was shocked by ‘SNL’ audience during Miss Eggy sketch

Saturday Night Live star Ego Nwodim admits she was genuinely shocked when the live studio audience began yelling back during her standout “Weekend Update” bit as the character Miss Eggy earlier this season.

“They really threw me for a loop, but it was so exciting because I love improv and so getting to play with them was so fun,” the comedian shared during an Emmys FYC panel moderated by SNL alum Fred Armisen on Monday night in Los Angeles. Fellow cast members Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, James Austin Johnson, Sarah Sherman, and Bowen Yang also took part.

During the April 5 episode’s bit, which Nwodim wrote with Josh Patten, Asha Ward, Carl Tart, and Will Stephen, a Def Comedy Jam-style stand-up comic named Miss Eggy pitches herself to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, demonstrating the kind of jokes she would tell. Mimicking an audience call-and-response routine, Nwodim turned the microphone toward the crowd — and they actually played along.

“This Miss Eggy, and Miss Eggy don’t what?” she asked during the sketch, as they yelled back “Play!” After laughing the surprise off, she continued. “Cory Booker out here with his filibuster. Shooot. I had my fill of busters. ‘Cause these men ain’t what?” she asked, again pointing the mic to the audience, who exclaimed, “S—,” resulting in a bleep during the live NBC broadcast.

During the panel, Nwodim reasoned that her choice to perform in front of the “Weekend Update” desk — which Armisen praised as “a pretty ballsy thing” — had emboldened the show’s live spectators.

“I think because I was in front of the desk and I was pacing and I was doing something perhaps they hadn’t seen before, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re in this, we’re all having a time together,'” she said.

Although the seven-season SNL pro used her extensive improv background to hilariously handle the rogue audience — joking “Y’all gonna have to pay for that. Lorne gonna be mad at y’all” — she confessed during the panel that she was thrown in real time and even worried the crowd was reading off her cue cards.

“The first time I said, ‘Miss Eggy don’t what?’ And I held the mic out and they said, ‘Play,’ you see me go, ‘What? How do you guys know that?'” she recalled. “And then I was having a moment while I was still reading the lines going, shoot, can they see the cards?”

She quickly realized that was impossible since the cue cards were facing the “Update” desk and her punchline of “Play” wasn’t even on the card yet.

The performer also shared that she gets asked what the audience was supposed to say in that moment, and the answer is simple.

“It’s nothing,” she explained. “The audience never says anything on Saturday Night Live. We didn’t expect them to say anything. They’re just supposed to laugh or not laugh.”

Gardner recalled something she’d noticed about the studio audience earlier that night.

“Chloe, Ego, Kenan [Thompson}, and I, we warm up the crowd before the show and so you see the audiences and you think any audience who’s there to see SNL is gonna be excited and sometimes they’re not,” she began. “We all wanted this to go really well and I remember looking out and knowing that she was gonna be going up to the audience and just seeing this group of women. It kind of felt like it was all women in the first row, and they were smiling, and you could tell they were there to have a good time, and I was like, that’s gonna carry through.”

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Nwodim, who revived her Miss Eggy character for an encore performance during the SNL season 50 finale hosted by Scarlett Johansson last month, agreed that the temperature of the audience can make a world of difference at the legendary sketch show.

“Depending on how tired they are, if something else annoyed them in the previous sketch, you just don’t know how something’s gonna go,” she said. “Its so nerve-racking.”

And if the audience hadn’t been in such a playful mood that night?

“If that had bombed and I was in front of the desk, the way I would have ran behind that desk and been like, ‘That’s my time,'” she laughed. “I’m glad it went that way. It was so fun.”

Watch Nwodim talk about Miss Eggy in the video above.