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I WAS HIRED ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE IN AUGUST 2001. We were supposed to have our first read-through on 9/11. I turned thirty years old five days later. My first year was a total blur that consisted of my trying not to get fired and trying not to die. It was a tough time to join the show. It felt like America might not ever smile, never mind laugh, again. I hoped that the entire idea of comedy would not be canceled just as I was starting this dream job. I like to refer to the transition period of any new job as “finding out where the bathrooms are.” Not only did I have to find the bathrooms, but I had to attempt to do comedy in a city that was battered and still on fire, while avoiding being killed by the ANTHRAX that had been sent to the floors below us. Talk about jitters.
Wonderful things happened my first year on SNL. Will and I decided to get married. I met Meredith Walker, who would become one of my best friends and help shepherd Smart Girls at the Party into the world with me. She was tall and from Texas and had already met Sting and Tupac. I got to see Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch every day. I met Seth Meyers in Mike Shoemaker’s office and something clicked inside of me, like a broken locket completed. I got to work with Will Ferrell. It’s tough for me to find a single story that would really explain to you what SNL felt like or what it meant to me. So I’m not going to try. I told you, writing is HARD. In lieu of that story, I present to you my bite-sized SNL memories, mixed in with some benign gossip about past hosts. Enjoy.
My first show was on September 29, 2001. I walked in the background during a “Wake Up, Wakefield” sketch but according to my parents, you couldn’t see me. Paul Simon sang “The Boxer” and Lorne Michaels solemnly asked Mayor Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” The mayor paused and answered, “Why start now?” Lorne wrote that joke. We all drank hard with exhausted firefighters at the after-party, their uniforms still covered with dust.
The first time I appeared on air was the last sketch of the night, a week later. I wrote it and played a porn star on a date with Seann William Scott. Seconds before we went live, Lorne asked me if I wanted white or red wine in the prop wineglasses. I still don’t know if he was genuinely asking or doing some Jedi mind trick to help me be less nervous.
In that same episode, Will Ferrell played an overzealous office worker who displays his patriotism by wearing an American flag Speedo. I watched him spread his legs and realized that America could and would laugh again. A few shows later, Will and I wrote a sketch where we played two background actors and I realized I wasn’t going to be fired. Will Ferrell is one of the most naturally talented people I have ever met. He was our benevolent captain and will always be a hero in my eyes because: 1) he used his talent to heal me and the country in ways he will never know, and 2) he is a straight-up king.
Later in my first season, they pulled host Britney Spears out of a cold open because she didn’t have time to change. I did her part with five minutes’ prep. It was a skiing scene and I may have worn her clothes. I also think I said “Live from New York” for the first time. For some reason I feel like Dan Aykroyd was also in it? I’m not sure. I could fact-check this but I’m too lazy.
Britney Spears also signed a poster for me that hung in my office. I don’t know where the poster is now. Here is a picture. Yes, I knit.
Molly Shannon, Kristen Wiig, and I all had that office at some point in our SNL careers. Each one of us carved her name in the desk.
One night Chris Parnell hid under that desk for an hour while I was writing. He kept gently hitting my drawer so it would spring open. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and so I looked below to investigate. He was curled up in a ball and I screamed my head off. There was a lot of pranking. Horatio Sanz used to call me and pretend he was a weird gentleman named Gomez Vasquez Gomez. Writer Andrew Steele used to leave us notes from a pervert named Thurman, letting us know he was a big fan of “butts and boobs.” Will Forte would call writer Emily Spivey and me to ask us to work on a sketch and we would come in to find him and his writer office-mates Leo Allen and Eric Slovin completely naked at their desks.
We were never fed and were left to our own devices when it came to meals. Interns would go on McDonald’s runs and buy a shitload of horrible candy. A lot of time was spent ordering food and waiting for it to be delivered. The traffic around 30 Rock often meant that we were constantly starving and complaining. One time, Slovin was bitching about his food taking forever, and once it arrived, Forte grabbed it and threw it out the window.
I cried a lot in Mike Shoemaker’s office. Once, a few years after 9/11, I did a 9/11-based joke on “Weekend Update” during rehearsal. It didn’t go well and I came offstage and cried to producer Mike Shoemaker about how I was bad at telling jokes and how I wanted to quit.
I also cried a lot in Maya Rudolph’s office and Spivey’s office. And in elevators. Some of the crying was from exhaustion or stress, and some of it was just the bitter burn of rejection. A teeny tiny cleaning lady named Rosa had worked at SNL for over thirty years. She barely spoke English and we all loved her. Maya and I were both crying about something and Rosa came in to empty the wastebasket. She put her hand on Maya’s shoulder and in a thick Spanish accent said, “Don’t cry, sexy.”
Tina wrote a sketch where Chris Kattan and I played a white trash couple. It was very physical and I blacked out during a show when I was flipped upside down into a Dumpster. I woke up to Kattan standing over me and yelling. John Goodman was the host that week and is probably still my favorite, because he was nice to me when no one knew my name.
Once, after a long after-party, I was outside smoking with “Weekend Update” writer and future Parks and Recreation creator Mike Schur. Seth Meyers was also there, as well as many other men whose opinion I cared about. Host Ashton Kutcher walked out of the party and headed to his limousine. He casually said good-bye to me and I loudly and sincerely shouted like a crazy fan, “Love you, Ashton. You’re the best!!” It was very uncool. I was much too loud.
When Sir Ian McKellen hosted, he greeted us every day by booming out in his perfect voice, “Good morning, actors!” Colin Farrell was super hungover and super nice. Hugh Jackman was incredibly kind and sent everyone a case of Foster’s beer. Jessica Simpson was the prettiest host I had ever seen without makeup. Bernie Mac was the sweetest and kindest.
Matthew McConaughey wore a sarong in Lorne’s office, I danced at a club with Christina Aguilera, and Antonio Banderas smelled the best of any host.
I made a drink for James Gandolfini to settle his nerves before an “Update” piece he was doing. Once I asked Paul Giamatti during the show if he was having fun, and he smiled and said, “This is a fucking nightmare!”
When Ashlee Simpson’s song screwed up, Dratch, Maya, and I were dressed in Halloween costumes for Parnell’s “Merv the Perv” sketch. We screamed and ran into Tom Broecker’s wardrobe department and hid under a table. Maya was dressed as a pregnant woman in a catsuit. I was Uma Thurman from Kill Bill. Dratch was Raggedy Ann. I remember us huddling together buzzing about the excitement of that weird live moment and then someone saying, “At least 60 Minutes is here.” For those who don’t remember, 60 Minutes was doing a profile on Lorne and happened to be there. Jackpot, Lesley Stahl!
Maya, Queen Latifah, and I were in a sketch where we had to sing a few songs as backup singers. Five seconds before we went live our stage manager, Gena, told us there was a problem with the track and we had to sing without music. We looked at each other wide-eyed and excited. When that sketch was over Latifah said, “That was crazy!” and we high-fived.
I sat in on Prince’s sound check. He was the musical guest and Steve Martin was the host. He walked over to me after he was done. My musician friend and lifelong Prince fan Amy Miles burst into tears. I turned to Prince and awkwardly asked him, “How was your summer?”
When U2 performed, Bono came over to hug me. My whole body blushed and I almost died from excitement and fear. Years later I paid him back by making out with him during a bit at the Golden Globes, thus completing a circle and allowing myself to effectively time-travel.
Speaking of time travel, I did a sketch with Jon Bon Jovi where I was a fourteen-year-old version of myself and he stepped out of a poster. The set was designed like my actual bedroom as a child, and Spivey and I had a long discussion about what brand of hair spray should be on the dresser. I think White Rain won. Jon Bon Jovi went into his own archives and got out the actual outfit he had worn twenty years before during the Slippery When Wet Tour. It still fit. Jon Bon keeps it tight.
I wrote that scene and most of my favorite scenes with Emily Spivey. Spivey is an insanely talented writer and actor from the Groundlings via North Carolina. She has a sharp tongue and gifted sense of character, and we would huddle together on Tuesday writing nights and try to do a “jam out,” which basically meant write something fast and fun. Out of that came Kaitlin, the hyperactive girl with a heart of gold. Kaitlin had boundless optimism, and she was a tribute to all latchkey kids who had to amuse themselves. It was also an homage to a Gilda Radner sketch called “The Judy Miller Show.” Spivey and I would spend hours talking about the genius of Gilda, or Jan Hooks, or Phil Hartman. We were also obsessed with the song “I’m No Angel” by Gregg Allman for some reason. We spent our whole tenure at SNL trying to get that song into a sketch. It ended up being the soundtrack to a scene where the super-pregnant me hits on Josh Brolin in a honky-tonk bar. Spivey was also pregnant at the time. It might have been the only time two pregnant women wrote a scene about a pregnant woman on SNL.
Courtesy of Broadway Video Enterprises and NBC Studios, LLC
Spivey and I wrote a sketch based on a real moment we had with the handsome and talented Justin Timberlake. He was hosting and came into the office one writing night. We both got very flummoxed, and it caused us to write a scene where I was attempting to give him notes backstage during a show. I was dressed as a leprechaun with a giant orange wig. I ended up getting tongue-tied and eventually just started humping on him. Justin had a lovely Southern woman who was his ex-teacher and “handler” at the time. She did not think it was a good idea for him to be shirtless during this sketch. I point to these boundaries as one reason why Justin has kept his shit together.
I once wrote a sketch where Steve Martin and I were two drunk people applying for a bank loan. It didn’t make air, but he still asks me about it sometimes, which is better.
You could spend the whole night working on a sketch and arrive the next morning to see that it was not in the read-through packet. Spivey and I wrote a sketch once about two dumb girls in a car shouting out the window at an eighteen-wheeler semi. The girls kept telling the driver to “honk it!!” Shoemaker called us the next morning to tell us the sketch wasn’t going to be read because there was no way to get a semi into Studio 8H. I’m sure he pulled it because he was trying to save us from embarrassment.
Read-through day was always exhausting and fun. I sat next to Seth and scribbled notes. Fred Armisen would write end-of-the-year diatribes where he pretended to be angry at everyone. They worked because we all loved Fred and we knew he loved us. One day before a Wednesday read-through, Rachel Dratch threw her back out and had to lie down on the floor. Host Johnny Knoxville offered to help and pulled ten loose pills out of his pocket before realizing none of them were painkillers. A hot NBC doctor came upstairs and all the single guys started hitting on her. Rachel did the entire first half of the read-through from the floor.
We had a sexual harassment meeting once and I spent the whole time sitting next to Will Forte drawing penises. At the end of the meeting I was asked to hand in the sign-in sheet and I gave the guy the penis paper by accident. Tracy Morgan used to tell us, “Don’t peak at dress,” and “Don’t let the pages jinx your shit.” Paula Pell was usually the funniest person in the room. Or Fred Armisen. Unless Baldwin was there.
“Debbie Downer” was one of the few sketches where I broke, and I remember watching Horatio Sanz laugh so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes. I still believe that sketch may be a cure for low-level depression if watched regularly.
Jim Downey ignored the fact that I never did a good impression of Hillary Clinton and used to sit with me between dress and air going over his notes for the scenes he had written. It took me a while to find a real “take” on her. We used to use videotapes to help with impressions, and I would take my tapes into Darrell Hammond’s room where he would give me tips on how to sound like Hillary. I gave her a crazy laugh, which she didn’t have in real life. As the election year progressed I loved getting to play her as this highly focused and slightly angry woman who was tired of being the smartest person in the room. I secretly hoped she watched some of my sketches and could live vicariously through the things I got to say.
The memories I have with Seth could fill a whole book. When I left SNL, I gave Seth a badge of courage, like Dorothy gives to the Cowardly Lion. The props department helped me make it. He kept it in his pocket during “Update” until he didn’t need it anymore. Now it sits in a box on his desk at Late Night.
When Tina left, I gave her dog tags that read “Pleasant Tomorrow.” Recently she gave them back to me while I was going through a tough time. I like to think we will give them back and forth to each other whenever needed.
“Bronx Beat” was a sketch that was a dream to write and perform. Maya and Spivey and I would just improvise for hours in their office. We named those characters after Jodi Mancuso and Betty Rogers in the SNL hair department. Jodi had that accent and attitude. Maya and I would sit on set a few minutes before our scene went on the air and just talk to each other in character.
I spent many nights sitting in Spivey’s office, smoking out the window and staring at the Empire State Building.
I spent many nights in Tina’s office, watching her write and pretending to help her.
I spent many nights in Seth’s office, watching him write and adjusting his temperature and lighting.
I watched the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting from Lorne’s office and all I remember thinking is “I am so tired.” Most of the bigger moments in my career happened in that office. Steve Higgins brought me in there to tell me I was hired. Lorne called me in to tell me I was doing “Update.” He told me that once I said my name everything would change. He was right. Lorne once told me he was “never nervous when [I was] out there.” He never scared me and often made me laugh. He handed me a rope and it was up to me whether I would climb it or use it to hang myself. He gave kind advice and expected the best from me. He loves his kids and paid for me to fix my teeth. One Saturday morning I bit into a bagel and the veneer Lorne had bought me popped off my front tooth. I had an emergency appointment at the dentist and spent an entire “Weekend Update” living a real-life stress dream that my tooth was going to fall out. Lorne is my friend and I love him and will always be grateful for the huge opportunities he gave me and continues to give me. I hope one of his assistants will print this out for him because otherwise he will probably never read this.
Every single time I heard Don Pardo announce my name I would bow my head in gratitude. Don kept his voice-over booth warm and stocked with goodies. He told me he used to drive to 30 Rock in the 1950s and park right out front. He would record for NBC and then use the two dollars he’d brought with him to buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He was one of many nonagenarians who still worked on the show. Another was lighting designer Phil Hymes. One time Kenan Thompson was testing with me as a possible “Weekend Update” replacement for Tina. Phil took a look at Kenan sitting next to me and said, “Kenan, I hope you don’t get this because there is no way I can light the two of you next to each other.”
Once Dratch and I played Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, respectively, in a sketch where we sat in a tree twenty feet in the air. I looked out over Studio 8H and for the millionth time laughed at my crazy life. Tina and I used to look at each other before “Update” and also laugh at our crazy lives. We would whisper, “We fooled them!” Sometimes I would pat her knee. One time I ran into Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, and Eric Idle in the hallway and I was legitimately mad that they were in my way, but the gratitude never left me. Comedy had not died. Someone was still letting me do it.