Don’t ask Fran Lebowitz about the recent “Saturday Night Live” sketch parodying her — because she has no interest in watching it.
During a recent chat on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM radio show, Lebowitz said she hasn’t seen last weekend’s “SNL” sketch that featured Bowen Yang and Kyle Mooney spoofing her new Netflix series with Martin Scorsese, “Pretend It’s a City.”
“You know that something is really sticking and really a thing when ‘Saturday Night Live’ does you,” Cohen told the iconic author before asking if she tuned into “SNL.”
“I did not see it,” Lebowitz responded. “I didn’t know anything about it. The next day I had shut my phones off. I was not asleep and I went into the kitchen where there’s my answering machine, a device which you may have to describe to your listeners. There were messages on it and I thought something horrible happened, someone died, you know? And so I got these messages.”
As it turns out, Lebowitz explained, she doesn’t have an easy way to watch “SNL” because she doesn’t own a cell phone or computer. In fact, she doesn’t even have Netflix. “And that’s OK,” she insisted, because she has zero interest in watching herself on screen.
“I generally don’t like to watch myself and this has always been true, even when I looked a lot better,” Lebowitz said. “I don’t like to watch myself. I don’t like to hear my voice. I would never watch myself on television when I know I’m on television. And people say, ‘Why don’t you want to watch?’ I say, ‘Well, I know what I said, and I don’t want to watch it.’”
She continued, “I’m trying to guess if I had known it was going to be on, would I have watched it? I probably would not have, but I would have at least known it was going to be on. I’m not certain whether they — they certainly didn’t alert me that this was going to be on. And so I was surprised by it. Yes. Because I know it’s a very big network television show and I would imagine that they would expect their viewers to know what they’re talking about.”
Watch the “SNL” sketch here and see Cohen’s interview with Lebowitz below.