NBC is celebrating comedy this year, particularly of the sketch variety, as Saturday Night Live marks a half-century on television. While we wait for Dave Chappelle, Timothée Chalamet and all of SNL’s Season 50 hosts and musical guests to return to the 2025 TV schedule, several of the show’s cast and crew are taking a look back in the docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. The job of a cast member is famously grueling, and apparently it all starts in the audition process, as Pete Davidson, Cheri Oteri and other alumni recall the horror of producers not laughing while they perform.
SNL50 is a four-part series that dropped January 16 to fans with a Peacock subscription, and the first of the installments celebrating Saturday Night Live’s milestone anniversary focuses on the audition process. There’s no question how nerve-wracking it is for these comedians to perform in front of showrunner Lorne Michaels and producers — Andy Samberg admits he threw up out of terror — and the fact that the producers remain fairly stoic only makes it worse. Pete Davidson recalled on the docuseries:
They pull the stage out. It was blacked out so you can’t see them. It was terrifying, ‘cause when you audition, there’s like three people there… Maybe two times in six minutes, someone just went, ‘Ha!’ I was like, ‘That was terrible. There’s no way I’m getting it.’
Pete Davidson, who was on SNL from 2014 to 2022, is not alone in his experience. Nasim Pedrad (2009-2014) also recalled “the dead silence of that audition,” and Cheri Oteri (1995-2000) said she was warned by another comedian just before she took the stage:
I remember on my audition, right before I was going in, a guy came out who had just finished, and he looked at me and he said, ‘Get ready. They don’t laugh.’
That sounds like an absolute nightmare, considering the bits the hopefuls are performing during those five-minute auditions that often include multiple impressions and zany characters. Kyle Mooney, who was a cast member from 2013 to 2022, even intentionally got Lorne Michaels’ name wrong during his 2012 audition and was left wondering how wise that decision was. He said:
I sort of at the time was doing this awkward interview character and kind of a version of myself that isn’t incredibly articulate… I was like, I wanna open my audition sort of as if I’m hosting Saturday Night Live. I did something like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m here at 30 Rockers in front of THE Lonnie Mickers!’ And it got no response. It was the very first thing I did, and I was like, ‘Oh no!’
It seems many of Saturday Night Live’s biggest stars all shared this experience of auditioning to a silent audience, and Michael Shoemaker, a producer from 1990 to 2009, wonders if that should change. Shoemaker said:
There’s nobody laughing. I think we should be better at it, frankly, at laughing. … You still can get laughs, but I think they’re all told, ‘Don’t worry that you don’t. Don’t lose your cool.’
While former SNL talent executive Ayala Cohen said she refused to fake a laugh so as not to “manipulate the process,” Marci Klein — the head of talent from 1995 to 2012 — validated what is likely every potential cast member’s worst fear when she said:
If something doesn’t make me laugh in the first minute, it’s not gonna get better.
That sounds like a pretty brutal process, but then again, nobody’s ever said it’s an easy job. In fact, David Spade has said it’s such a “fucking beating” that not many SNL cast members last longer than a handful of seasons, which makes Kenan Thompson, Pete Davidson and the other cast members with long tenures especially impressive.
If you want to hear more about the past 50 years of Saturday Night Live and see some of your favorite cast members’ original auditions, all four episodes of SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night are streaming now on Peacock, as the sketch comedy resumes its season at 11:30 p.m. ET Saturday, January 18, on NBC.
