Sabrina Carpenter Jokes About Provocative Image in ‘SNL’ Monologue

Sabrina Carpenter, the host and musical guest of this week’s “Saturday Night Live,” used her monologue to hone her risqué image, suggesting that she wants to be known for more than just being sexually provocative, while of course joking that she does indeed have a one-track mentality.

“Now that I’m here, I want to clear up some of the misconceptions people have about me,” Carpenter said. “Everyone thinks of me as some kind of horny pop star, but there’s really so much more to me. I’m not just horny. I’m also excited and sexually charged. And I love reading. My favorite book is the encyclopedia. It’s so big and difficult…”

The pop star showed off the controversial cover photo of her recent album ‘Man’s Best Friend’. “Some people were a little freaked out by the cover. I’m not sure why,” she said. “It was just me, on my hands and knees, with an invisible figure pulling my hair. But what people don’t realize is that’s how they cropped it. If you zoom out, it’s clearly a photo from Bowen (Yang)’s 50th anniversary special helping me with my hair…” The image zoomed out further: “… after Martin Short pushed me out of the buffet line.”

Whatever the case, Carpenter confessed, “There’s a real person underneath all the glitter, the wigs and the corsets. And something else you might not know about me is that I like to interact with the audience during my show.” She made her way into the crowd and interacted with a young man who identified himself as Will from Maryland – both of which, of course, excited her. “Ooh, what a sexy, unusual place. Look, I like talking to normal people. They’re so fascinating when they’re really like you.”

But when she asked what the audience member did for a living, and he replied “venture capital,” she quickly moved on.

“The last thing I like to do at my concerts is arrest someone for having a short temper. So who can I arrest here tonight?” Kenan Thompson came out with a pair of pink handcuffs and said he wasn’t arresting her because she was hot, but “because she falsely impersonated an officer 200 times at your concerts.”

Thompson said he was actually there to buy a Cameo for his daughter, but Carpenter told him that would cost $200,000″ — and as he continued, she announced that “if anyone else wants one, find me on Venmo.”

The monologue followed an opening sketch from Domingo in which Carpenter was one of several women at a birthday party describing a bachelor-style trip to Nashville while singing parody versions of Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” and Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra.”

Later, for her first musical number, Carpenter sang her No. 1 hit “Manchild” with girlish glee on a stage decorated as a bedroom, bouncing around on a bed in a yellow “SNL” T-shirt and pink “SNL” underwear, surrounded on either side by the band and eventually joined in the foreground by a saxophonist.

The second musical number, “Nobody’s Son,” featured Carpenter singing in a martial arts setting. Controversy arose when she sang the words “fucked up” uncensored twice on the East Coast. However, viewers on the West Coast reported that the audio went silent in those two cases, with the censors apparently having more tape delay for that feed.