You could make a damn fine Saturday Night Live cast out of funny people who never made it out of the writers’ room. That group reads like a cast of comedy all-stars, united by the fact that nearly all of them had a miserable time on the show.
Zach Galifianakis
The Hangover star and eventual SNL host lasted two weeks as a writer in 2000 before deciding he wasn’t cut out for the sketch grind. The concepts he pitched all landed with a thud, including an idea he had for a Britney Spears-hosted show.
Galifianakis (and America) noticed that young Spears “showed her belly button a lot,” he told Rob Lowe on his Literally podcast. That prompted an idea in which Will Ferrell would play a security guard stationed inside Spears’ navel, courtesy of the magic of green screen. The response at the table read? “I feel like a tumbleweed went right across the writers’ room table,” he said, “and a cricket riding it.”
Louis C.K.
“I was going broke, and SNL was like the last chance, the last boat leaving, so Dave Attell, Laura Kightlinger, Sarah Silverman, Jay Mohr and me and a bunch of other people all auditioned,” C.K. told A Special Thing. “Then, over the following week, Laura Kightlinger got cast, Dave Attell, Sarah, Jay, everybody but me.”
But the showcase was good enough for James Downey to recommend C.K. as a writer to Robert Smigel, who hired the comic to work on SNL’s TV Funhouse satires. He’s listed as a co-writer on many of the animated segments, including the irreverent Bambi 2002.
Dave Attell
C.K. was right — Attell did get hired based on that audition but only as a writer. His one season on the show was a less than fulfilling experience, he told Dana Carvey and David Spade on the Fly on the Wall podcast.
“I know SNL is an experience, it’s different for everybody, but, for me, it was kind of like something I did when I really wanted to do stand-up,” Attell confessed. “Agents and managers said this would be great. And I auditioned, and Lorne (Michaels) liked me and I was a writer. I wasn’t a performer. And, you know, I really wanted to learn how to do it, but I didn’t really have that mindset yet. I really wanted to be a stand-up. I wanted to be Bill Hicks or Sam Kinison.”
Bob Odenkirk
Continuing the theme of “I had a miserable time writing for SNL,” here’s Bob Odenkirk. “The whole thing was weird to me,” he says in oral history Live From New York. “The whole thing. To me, what was fun about comedy and should have been exciting about Saturday Night Live was the whole generational thing, you know, a crazy bunch of people sittin’ around making each other laugh with casual chaos. … And to go into a place where this one distant and cold guy is in charge and trying to run it the way he ran it decades ago is just weird to me.”
J.B. Smoove
“I ain’t gonna lie — that job at SNL is a beast,” Smoove told Metro Philadelphia. The comic auditioned for the cast, but he lost out to a guy named Kenan Thompson. Lorne Michaels asked Smoove if he’d come on as a writer instead.
“I knew that SNL would look great on my resume, so I wrote there for three seasons, did a few characters and the warm-up monologues,” Smoove explained. “I used to run downstairs and do the Conan O’Brien show. I got four separate checks. That’s the New York hustle – get one job, create three more. I was considered the king of the pitch at SNL, too. It was not easy. I only got some of the things I pitched on air, but I could work my way through the cast members. And it was fulfilling. I loved the pace of live TV. I would do it all again, SNL. SNL was about planting seeds.”