yes please(28)

Having said all this I would like to pitch some taglines for the inevitable Human Centipede 4 movie.





humping justin timberlake




? NBC/Getty Images

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.”