As hard as it may be to believe, John Candy only hosted Saturday Night Live one time in his entire career. Despite working with a number of SNL cast members and appearing in the spinoff film The Blues Brothers, the Uncle Buck star’s association with the long-running sketch comedy series was limited to just three appearances. Aside from his single hosting gig in 1983, Candy had a brief cameo in an October 1981 SNL Newsbreak segment as Juan Gavino, who provides a weather report for Mexicans looking to cross the border into America. The only other time he showed up was to promote a 1985 episode that he didn’t even end up doing.
Candy’s October 22, 1983, stint as host at least gives us an idea of what things might’ve been like if he’d appeared on SNL more often. That show also happened to mark Jim Belushi’s debut as a cast member, and the two were paired up in a number of sketches throughout the evening. One of the more memorable segments that night featured Candy as a priest trying to get Belushi to confess over the phone because the confessional was out of order. Take a look below.
Candy cut his teeth doing sketch comedy on SCTV prior to guesting on SNL, and unsurprisingly caught the attention of SNL producer Dick Ebersol at one point or another. According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1985 book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Ebersol made a significant effort to lure Candy and his co-star, Catherine O’Hara, away from SCTV. Being caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between the two shows reportedly left Candy mortified, and he retreated to his farm, where he refused to answer his phone. While Ebersol succeeded in briefly hiring O’Hara, Candy opted to stay with SCTV.
Could that have something to do with his lack of involvement with SNL? It’s possible. What we do know is that Candy was approached about doing SNL way more times than he actually appeared on it. In the 2015 book Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, one-time cast member Bob Odenkirk was quoted as saying, “Supposedly John Candy was like the most-burned potential host, in that he would never host the show, because he’d been asked to do it so many times and then told ‘no thanks’ at the last minute by the staff.” As for why that was, Odenkirk pointed the finger at showrunner Lorne Michaels, who apparently had a habit of scheduling multiple hosts for the same week. Evidently, he didn’t prioritize Candy as much as the others he’d scheduled along with him—the majority of the time, anyhow.
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