What It’s Really Like to Work for ‘SNL,’ as Told by Former Performers & Writers

As you can see in the film Saturday Night and the TV shows 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, making a weekly sketch comedy show like Saturday Night Live involves long hours in an atmosphere thick with stress, egos, and insecurities, in which your work could be received with roars of laughter one moment and insufferable silence the next.

Not everyone enjoys the comedy pressure cooker that is SNL, which just ended its 50th season in characteristically hilarious and boundary-pushing fashion. Below, see what former SNL cast members and writers have said about their work on the NBC sketch comedy show.

“They take that one thing, and they wring it.”

“I’ve been doing comedy so long, it’s like, I know what I am. And I know what I’m giving them. At SNL, they take that one thing, and they wring it,” Leslie Jones, a cast member from 2013 to 2019, told NPR. “They wring it because that’s the machine. So whatever it is that I’m giving that they’re so happy about, they feel like it’s got to be that all the time or something like that. So [I] was, like, a caricature of myself. You know what I’m saying? So it was like, now either I’m trying to love on the white boys or beat up on the white boys, or I’m doing something just, like, loud.”

“They put people into boxes.”

“You go where you’re appreciated,” Jay Pharaoh explained on Ebro in the Morning as he reflected on leaving SNL after six years. “If you have multiple people on the cast saying things like, ‘You’re so talented, and you’re able, and they don’t use you, and it’s unfair, and it’s making us feel bad because they don’t use you, and you’re a talent’… They put people into boxes. And whatever they want you to do, they expect you to do.”

“I was getting increasingly frustrated.”

“I got a writing job in ’84,” Larry David said at a Vanity Fair event, recalling writing for SNL’s 10th season. “It was an easy job, I was writing sketches. They weren’t putting any of my sketches on the air. The sketches were funny at the read-through, but the producer, Dick Ebersol, he didn’t care for them. I was getting increasingly frustrated. The sketches would get cut. I only had one sketch on the entire year.”

John P. Johnson/HBO

“It’s very hard to be zen and chill there.”

“That place, it’s so magical, it’s so amazing, but there is just something about it where they just have this energy that puts you in your place, where you feel like a piece of s***, and you’re terrified,” Sarah Silverman, who was an SNL writer and cast member from 1993 to 1994, told Howard Stern. “The anxiety… it’s very hard to be zen and chill there.”

“It was a marathon, [but] they cut my Achilles.”

“I feel like it was a marathon, but the week I got there, they cut my Achilles. They’re like, okay, start running,” Michaela Watkins said on the Last Laugh podcast after her performing in one SNL season between 2008 and 2009. “I don’t feel like I came in into a soft landing at all. I thought that this was my big break. I thought that it was going well. I thought we were all having a good time, but then they didn’t renew my contract the next year. Maybe I was delusional. I really wanted to go back.”

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“You’re just exhausted…”

“It’s hard to write that show,” Bob Odenkirk, who wrote for SNL between 1987 and 1991, explained to Kelly Clarkson. “When I come in here and I walk these hallways, I just remember myself [at] 26 years old, [thinking] ‘I don’t have any comedy ideas left!’ And you’re just exhausted after you do — you know, by Christmas, you’ve done, like, 11 shows, and you have nothing in your brain. And it’s rough.”

“I always thought we [writers] had the harder job.”

Coming back to host SNL after spending five years in the writers’ room was a wake-up call for John Mulaney. “I was absolutely terrified,” he told NPR. “To be performing something you’ve written and trying to listen to the jokes while making sure you’re on your mark and looking into the right camera and then being pulled around to do costume fittings — it was scary. … I always thought we [writers] had the harder job. … I had no idea how hard this was.”

“You try to figure out how to fit in, but it’s impossible.”

“You try to figure out how to fit in, but it’s impossible. It’s very cliquish,” Zach Galifianakis said on Off Camera With Sam Jones, recalling a two-week SNL writing stint early in his career, during which one of his sketches bombed in a read-through. “I remember it was so silent, I remember hearing the A/C shut down in the middle of the sketch … and I just remember Tina [Fey], who I was sitting next to, I just remember her putting her hand on my shoulder. … In my mind, it was her going, ‘It’s okay.’”

“It’s an incredibly nerve-wracking, intimidating experience.”

“The first hurdle you go through is the Wednesday read-through. You’re in a room with all the writers, all the performers, all the producers, all the designers, and NBC legal. It’s a tough room, and they’ve heard a lot of comedy over the years,” Tina Fey told The Believer, midway through her run as SNL writer and cast member. “The first time you get a laugh in that room is really exciting. But you also spend a lot of time in that room eating s***. It’s an incredibly nerve-wracking, intimidating experience. You sweat from your spine out, you’re woozy, and you can feel your heartbeat in your mouth.”