Say this for Saturday Night Live — if performers don’t have the goods, they don’t stick around for long. A number of talented comics didn’t get asked back for even a second season, including future stars Sarah Silverman, Jenny Slate and Ben Stiller. But just because comics are good enough to earn multiple seasons doesn’t mean they can’t overstay their welcome. Here are four SNL performers who milked the show for all it was worth…
Kenan Thompson
Hear me out. Clearly, Thompson is an SNL Hall-of-Famer, logging more episodes and more sketches than anyone else in the show’s history. Bravo! But at this point, what does Thompson have left to prove?
Thompson rarely develops recurring characters like Diondre Cole these days. Instead, he supports other cast members with the greatest comic reactions in the history of Studio 8H. A steady hand is always welcome, and a sketch with Thompson is guaranteed to deliver some laughs, but after 21 seasons, isn’t it time for him to stretch his wings somewhere else? He’s lasted longer than Gunsmoke, at one point the longest-running show in TV history. Just because you can do a show forever doesn’t mean you should.
Cecily Strong
Used to be Lorne Michaels wouldn’t let Jon Lovitz have a week off to finish a movie. But in recent years, the SNL producer has granted extended leaves of absence to stars like Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong. Flexibility is fine, but if performers want to move on to bigger and better things, why not release them into the wild?
Strong wasn’t around for the first few episodes of Season 48 thanks to her stage run in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. That was after missing nearly half of Season 46 to film Schmigadoon. More power to her! But with Strong’s interests pointing elsewhere, why return to the show for only a few episodes? Could it have anything to do with setting the record for most appearances by a female cast member? Strong jumped ship shortly after breaking McKinnon’s record.
Darrell Hammond
No one likes to get a check signed by Michaels more than Hammond. Until Thompson showed up, he was the show’s longest-tenured cast member, doing his spot-on celebrity and political impressions for 14 seasons.
But wait, Hammond wasn’t done yet. After Don Pardo passed away, Hammond returned as the show’s voice announcer, a job he’s held for the last 10 seasons. Fourteen seasons plus 10 more — yep, that’s even more than Thompson. For Hammond, Saturday Night Live has been the gift that keeps on giving and giving and giving …
Tim Meadows
Meadows was an affable presence on Saturday Night Live but hardly a star. It took years for him to create a character that caught on with audiences, a fact he lamented in a 1992 sketch in which the cast members were introduced by their most famous creations, like Mike Myers with Wayne from Wayne’s World and Dana Carvey with The Church Lady. The sketch ended with Meadows complaining, “This is personal to me. Mainly because I don’t have an SNL character to play.”
Meadows eventually developed The Ladies Man, a character the show beat into the ground before launching a failed movie. Despite not finding either the SNL or movie success enjoyed by contemporaries Myers, Adam Sandler or Chris Farley, Meadows lasted 10 seasons on the show — a record until Hammond broke it years later.