Comedy Central
As you probably knew from your DVR’s sad creaking noises, Saturday Night Live‘s 40th anniversary special on Sunday lasted well over three hours and roped in several dozen of the show’s most famous cast members, as well as other celebrity cameos on stage and out in the audience. Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers have already shared stories of the epic afterparty, but last night another former Weekend Update anchor decided to share a little more.
Over the course of more than two hours, Norm MacDonald took to Twitter in order to document the week he spent back around Studio 8H, in the writers’ room helping with sketches and just hanging out with his son, awestruck at the talent assembled. Most enlightening is his recounting of how he, Lori Jo Hoekstra, and Tonight Show announcer Steve Higgins went about writing the raucous Celebrity Jeopardy sketch. MacDonald digs into his own philosophy on the sketch’s place in SNL history, and difficulties with casting the third podium, dating back to the first time it aired. The best tidbit about Sunday’s incarnation: Kenan Thompson wasn’t the original choice to play Bill Cosby at the end. (Kenan was great, but if it had gone down as Higgins envisioned, it would’ve been an all-timer.)
Norm being Norm, he goes off on a few tangents—Mike Myers’ work ethic, Bill Murray’s golf habits, and Rob Sheffield’s ranking of every SNL cast member in Rolling Stone—but eventually gets back to the point. It’s a fascinating glimpse at how even something as totemic and highly-promoted as a 40th anniversary special couldn’t be a meticulously organized program. Like every episode since 1975, the blowout celebration was in danger of flying off the track right up until Fallon and Timberlake went on the air.
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