A doll that takes the HPV vaccine!

SNL's "Lil Poundcake" Misses the Joke on HPV. In all the conversation about SNL’s “Lil Poundcake” parody yesterday, why didn’t anyone point out the real reason the mock ad (for a doll which sneakily injects its owner with three doses of the HPV vaccine) was a comedy misfire? Lil Poundcake isn’t funny, and it’s not satire. As so often happens, SNL writers only made half the joke.

Beware: I’m going to kill even the faint humor of Lil Poundcake by overanalyzing it. The little girls dancing around with Lil Poundcake are only funny if you accept that it’s ridiculous to inoculate a child that young against a sexually transmitted disease—presumably because those girls should be playing with dolls, not playing doctor. But targeting girls who play with dolls is, in fact, the idea behind the age at which the HPV vaccine is recommended. It’s just true (if a little sad), and there’s nothing that funny about mocking it.