There are so many reasons why a British version of Saturday Night Live is an awful idea, John Oliver told Seth Meyers this week. But the biggest reason SNL should stay on this side of the Atlantic, he says? SNL is like a cult.
“Saturday Night Live is such a unique group. It’s a cult,” Oliver claimed. “I’m trying not to say the word, but it’s a cult.
And so I don’t know how you can impose that cult onto the U.K.” Hang on a second — did Oliver forget who he was talking to? Meyers isn’t only a former cast member of SNL but its head writer for a spell as well. The Late Night host was curious about Oliver’s perspective as an outsider: What exactly was “cult-ish” about his old show?
Don't Miss For starters, Oliver pointed to the SNL ritual of staying up all night on Tuesdays to write sketches. “That’s ridiculous,” he argued. “That’s the kind of thing a cult leader would make you do: ‘We stay up all night on Tuesdays, by the way.’” Meyers conceded that plenty of great sketch comedy has been written, in both the United States and the U.K., without doing it at four in the morning.
“I think it’s been proven that SNL is the outlier,” Oliver laughed. “It doesn’t have to be dictated to the day, that you must not sleep on that day, or the great leader will be irritated.” Why create a U.K. version of Saturday Night Live in the first place, Oliver wondered aloud. “It sounds like a terrible idea,” he said, pointing out that his home country has managed to create sketch comedy in the past.
Really excellent sketch comedy, conceded Meyers, without mentioning the obvious names: Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The League of Gentlemen, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Little Britain, French and Saunders and Not the Nine O’Clock News, to name a few. Advertisement While Oliver wouldn’t endorse a U.K. SNL, he did express delight at getting to recreate a cut-at-dress-rehearsal Saturday Night Live sketch with Will Ferrell. The two funny guys, along with Bowen Yang and Rachel Dratch, performed the bit on Meyers’ Second Chance Theatre a year earlier.
Play Ferrell played Doug, an office wonk who has groomed his appearance to look exactly like Gabe Kaplan from Welcome Back, Kotter. The original sketch “died with Will Ferrell at dress rehearsal,” noted Meyers, “and then died here.” Advertisement Advertisement “Kind of died again,” Oliver agreed. No one likes to be in a flailing comedy scene, but at least Oliver “got to see up close the magic of Will Ferrell in a sketch that wasn’t working,” said Meyers.
“You had told me that he has this kind of sociopathic thing where he will never break,” Oliver said. “And it was really great to see his eyes, almost like his pupils dilate, as it started bombing again. There was a twinkle of happiness, but a sense of ‘I’m going to go all the way to the end of this.’” Fascinating, said Meyers.
Truly daredevil-type stuff. Or maybe Ferrell was exhibiting the psychotic behavior that one learns in the cult of SNL.
