Fan-favorite former Saturday Night Live cast member Bill Hader caused some major “frustration” for SNL boss Lorne Michaels, he and Conan O’Brien revealed Monday.
O’Brien said he knew Michaels “would get frustrated” by Hader and writing partner John Mulaney’s obsessions about very small things in show business,” O’Brien told Hader on the latest episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
“Lorne loves a big—he likes a home run hitter. He likes someone who’s gonna go out there, like, ‘Gimme your church lady. Gimme the character that everyone just can’t wait to see,’ softball down the middle,” O’Brien explained. “And I know that you guys loved coming up with stuff that would kind of… The one I’m thinking of is, you were doing a Judd Hirsch impression on the show.”
Hader agreed, recalling that his and Mulaney’s specific brand of humor didn’t always go over well with Michaels—or SNL writer-producer Steve Higgins. Even after he left the show and came back to host in 2014, Hader said the guardrails were up right away. “When I came back to host, Steve Higgins said out of the gate, he goes, ‘Alright, none of that sandwich in a briefcase s–t that you and Mulaney like so much.’”
He described the’70s cop show parody sketch he and Mulaney came up with that neither Michaels—nor the rest of the show’s crew—found as funny as they did. “It was called ‘Kanish in Color.’”
“It was a cop show, a seventies cop show called ‘Kanish.’ And the host was Kanish, and then we basically just did that thing we ripped off from the Police Squad!… where we all froze and we pretended to be frozen. And someone came in. The joke was that they would freeze too early,” he explained on the podcast. Indicating O’Brien and his co-hosts didn’t get the joke, Hader said, “And it played like this,” when he and Mulaney pitched it at SNL.
“Everybody was like, ‘Why is this happening?’ And we were like—we could not get through it, we were laughing so hard.” The dress rehearsal version of the sketch with Zach Galifianakis, who hosted that week, was later posted online. Hader said he and Mulaney received a hard “no” to getting the sketch into the show.
“I just remember it was one of those things, If you had seen it at SNL, everybody has their stacks of scripts and they’re kind of reading along. And if something sucks, you’ll just see someone, in the middle of a sketch, just go and just drop it on the floor,” Hader continued. “Everybody was just dropping it, looking at the next sketch, like, ‘There’s no way we’re doing this.’ And so when you see that, you just like, take it slower.”
More insight into the kind of comedy Michaels doesn’t find amusing emerged during their conversation Monday, when O’Brien recalled Leslie Nielsen hosting the show in 1989. “He famously had this thing made that would make a farting noise,” O’Brien said, and “he kept doing it to Lorne.”
“Lorne always keeps his dignity in any situation. And I’ll never forget Leslie Nielsen… Lorne will be like, ‘So I think we’re gonna do…’” O’Brien trailed off, making the “fart noise” Nielsen would use to interrupt Michaels mid-sentence.
“It’s his least favorite kind of comedy,” O’Brien said of the SNL boss. “You could see that big chunks of Lorne’s organs were dying. Just dying,” he joked.
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