Sarah Silverman is headed to Saturday Night Live this week. The move marks the veteran comedian’s first turn as a host on NBC’s late night sketch comedy series. However, it won’t mark her first time on the SNL stage. During the 1993-1994 season, Silverman was a featured player on Saturday Night Live. During her time in the cast, she got up to plenty of shenanigans, and this week she spoke out about the time she stabbed Al Franken in the head.
Silverman recently appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to talk about her time with the cast so many years ago. She mentions a story about stealing socks and boxers, and other behind-the-scenes stories, then brings up the fact that she looked to now-Senator Al Franken as a mentor during her time on the show.
“Like during rewrites and stuff, I would always sit next to him. And I would always be kind of leaning back in my chair like a cool kid—really cool. There’s like an inner monologue going on and I don’t know if I was thinking in words or pictures, but I know that it was a winter, so he had a really big Jew fro (they grow them for the winter).”
Silverman was clearly really invested in Franken's hairdo. She couldn't stop staring at him in the meeting, which eventually led to the notorious stabbing story.
“I was just kind of like a million miles away looking at his hair. The whole table has really sharpened pencils, like super sharp… and in my mind, I just thought, I’m gonna like stab this [pencil] through his hair. But what everyone saw, because this is what happened, was that I just stabbed him really hard. Because I was going to go through his hair in my mind but it just went in his temple. He screamed something like, 'WHY?'... I somehow wasn’t asked back for the next season.”
It’s tough to make it on the late night sketch series, and stabbing one of the show’s longest running and well-respected writers is probably not going to earn you any brownie points on the series, although it’s highly unlikely the incident led to her firing, as she joked. As long as Silverman didn’t go out of her way to stab people on the SNL set this week, we expect things to run much more smoothly.
Silverman’s hosting gig is part of SNL Season 40. Chris Pratt kicked off the season last week, and Bill Hader is expected to take the reigns next week. Maroon 5 will also be appearing with Silverman onstage on Saturday night, and since Adam Levine has hosted the series before, I expect the band might even pop up in a sketch. You can catch Saturday Night Live on NBC on Saturday nights at 11:35 p.m. EST.
If you want to hear the Franken story from Silverman’s own lips, hop over to the next page.
