The number crunchers at Saturday Night Network offered an interesting nugget about Saturday Night Live’s most recent episode, hosted by Sabrina Carpenter. It was the first installment of the show without a celebrity cameo since the Jason Momoa show in November 2023.
That’s a span of almost two years in which a celebrity or SNL alum dropped by the show for a brief moment of “Hey, look, it’s That Guy!”
I begrudgingly bought in last season, when welcome-backs to Dana Carvey, Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg served to celebrate Saturday Night Live’s 50th year. But most of the time, celeb cameos are an exercise in stunt casting with an emphasis on the stunt. SNL leaned into the obnoxious practice during the first Trump administration, when showing up in the cold open was a glamorous way to say “I’m part of the comedy resistance.” Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh, Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump, Ben Stiller as Michael Cohen, Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller and eventually Brad Pitt as Anthony Fauci all showed up to collect their clapter — that term coined by Seth Meyers to denote a combination of laughter and applause that signals “I’m on the right side of history.”
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Clapter rarely means, “That’s funny.”
Even when the show isn’t getting political with its famous friends, SNL cameos are more about getting a reaction than a laugh. When Barbra Streisand popped into an episode of “Coffee Talk” in 1992, there was genuine delight in seeing Mike Myers lose his mind. (He allegedly had no idea Streisand was going to crash the party.) But there was nothing funny about it — just a surprising moment of a celebrity descending from the heavens to goof for the camera.
Part of the problem is one of Lorne Michaels’ own making. His practice in recent years of employing as many as 20 comedians to fill the cast means people get left out every week —completely shut out, not in the show at all. When a celebrity stops by to wink at the masses, precious minutes of stage time are snatched from someone busting their ass to make their mark.
In what’s becoming an increasingly rare occurrence, every cast member got at least a minute of screen time in the Sabrina Carpenter show, with first-year featured players Veronika Slowikowska, Tommy Brennan and Ben Marshall getting much-needed extended reps. Do they get those chances if Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey or Adam Sandler decided to pay a visit?
Even Carvey, who shamelessly mugged through several episodes in Season 50, recognizes that his fun came at a cost to the regular cast. He’d have a blast playing Joe Biden, but what about Mikey Day, the cast member who’d played Biden the year before? “I asked Steve Higgins, ‘Does he still want to play Biden?’ He said Mikey would be relieved,” Carvey said on his Fly on the Wall podcast. “I hope that’s true.”
Carvey knows that no comedian wants to watch from the wings while outsiders drop by to collect their laughs. The Sabrina Carpenter episode was a step in the right direction, Lorne — leave the celebrities at home and let your cast of comics do the job you hired them for.
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