In a recent episode of SNL, we saw OCD once again treated as a made-up issue, instead of the serious mental health condition that it is.
Dave Chappelle kicked off 2025 by hosting Saturday Night Live and starring in a sketch called “The Immigrant Dad Talk Show” with Marcello Hernández.
Hernández plays the show’s host, Joaquin Antonio Gonzalez Hernández Suarez, with Chappelle playing his guest and neighbor, Richard. The sketch aims to skewer dads with backwards notions of masculinity, as the fathers bond over being disappointed in their adult sons for everything from being vegan to wanting to do improv comedy.
It’s all fairly silly and most of the jokes are at Hernández’s expense—until the subject of mental health comes up. Chappelle explains, “My son said he diagnosed himself with OCD. I said, ‘Oh? See deez nuts!’”
Though the “deez nuts” joke has certainly been overplayed long past the point of being funny, we’re once again reminded that OCD is the go-to mental health condition to make fun of.
In the late 80s, SNL was running sketches like Phil Hartman’s Anal Retentive Chef and Calvin Kleen’s Compulsion (a spoof of Calvin Klein’s Obsession commercial), both of which played on the OCD cliches of symmetry and cleanliness. Now, nearly 40 years later, why are we still seeing jokes that OCD isn’t a serious mental health problem?
Granted, the context of Chapelle’s joke is different. Instead of mocking somebody for wanting everything to be clean, it’s mocking a father who thinks his son’s mental health issues are fake. Anyone who’s encountered a parent who views OCD, depression, anxiety, etc. as signs of weakness—or dismisses the concept of mental health conditions entirely—is all too familiar with the pain this can cause. This might be due to differences in generational attitudes, or as the Immigrant Dad Show sketch illustrates, because of cultural views on mental health.
But the satire never really lands. Sure, both of the dad characters prove themselves to be out-of-touch dirtbags, but instead of coming to any real point about the harm this kind of parenting can do, all they do is punch down. And for the millions of Americans experiencing a mental health crisis, or the millions of people in the OCD community, this might not be so funny. When OCD is always the butt of the joke, it leads to people not getting diagnosed—or misdiagnosed—leaving them to get mistreated and lose years of their life without accessing effective treatment.
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“OCD is often used as a punchline, but actually having OCD is no joke,” says NOCD therapist April Kilduff, MA, LCPC, LMHC, LPCC, LPC. “It can be one of the most debilitating mental health disorders a person can have. Joking about it minimizes that, and also hurts both those with OCD and those who might have it by promoting outdated stereotypes.”
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Trying to censor SNL writers isn’t the answer here. Instead, a more constructive path forward is to help raise awareness around OCD—what it really is, as well as how seriously it can impact a person’s life. This way, we can move past pernicious stereotypes so people who have OCD (or anyone who’s concerned that they’re showing symptoms) can be empowered to seek the treatment they need, without fear of being judged or minimized.