The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Martha Stewart famously spent five months in a federal correctional facility after she was found guilty on felony charges back in 2004 and as it turns out that time cost her the chance to host SNL because her parole officer refused to allow her to host after she was released. She spoke about this last night with longtime SNL alum Jimmy Fallon.
During her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Martha Stewart and Jimmy got to talking about how she is a frequent object of impersonation on SNL. Jimmy pointed out that she’s been impersonated nine times on SaturdayNight Live. Martha said “yeah, I love it” when asked if she enjoys the impersonations, adding that “imitation is the highest form of flattery.”
Jimmy then asks Martha Stewart if she would ever want to host SNL and that’s when she dives into the story. The way she tells it, Lorne Michaels/the show asked her to host as she was being discharged from Alderson (the prison) but that her parole officer refused to allow her the time to host the show. Here’s the clip with more quotes below:
Martha went on to say she was “allowed to be out of (her) house 8 hours a day” … Jimmy cuts her off with “the parole officer said no?” and Martha shot back “no, that b——.” Martha Stewart half-joked that she still has the P.O.’s name and his phone number and added that she’d still love to host one day. All of this sort of felt like the start of a campaign to get people talking about Martha hosting SNL in order to speak it into reality.
Side note, does anyone else notice that Martha and Lorne Michaels speak with a nearly identical cadence?
After watching her doc on Netflix I’m fairly certain that she would crush it. Part of what Martha reveals is there isn’t much if anything that she isn’t capable of doing at the highest of levels. And on the flip side, she is as cut throat as anyone in the pursuit of her goals.
The Martha documentary dropped on Netflix late last year and it also dove into her time in prison and how she felt that she was in very real danger at times on the federal prison grounds in Alderson, West Virginia. That same documentary also left me with a very, very different impression of Martha Stewart than I previously had. I definitely suggest giving it a watch and I’d be curious to hear what you all think about her after watching it.