Worst Saturday Night Live Hosts
Every Saturday Night Live fan has their own opinions about which hosts sucked, but some were true nightmares to work with behind the scenes!
Here are the 14 worst SNL guests, according to actual cast members:
1.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Bowen Yang revealed “the worst SNL host behavior [he’s] witnessed,” saying, “This man, this person, this host made multiple cast members cry. On Wednesday, before the table read, because he hated the ideas.” A few months later, his castmate Chloe Fineman seemingly revealed the host’s identity in a since-deleted TikTok. Responding to an insulting tweet Elon Musk made about the show, she said, “I’m gonna come out and say, at long last, that I’m the cast member that he made cry, and he’s the host that made someone cry.”
She continued, “Maybe there are others. But I saw some articles and stuff and was like, ‘I’m not gonna say anything,’ but I’m like, no, if you’re going to go on your platform and be rude, guess what? You made I, Chloe Fineman, burst into tears because I stayed up all night writing this sketch, I was so excited, I came in, I asked if you had any questions, and you stared at me like you were firing me from Tesla and were like, ‘It’s not funny.’ I waited for you to be like, ‘Haha, JK.’ Then you started pawing through my script, like, flipping each page, being like, ‘I didn’t laugh, I didn’t laugh once, not one time.’ … Cut to the sketch made it on, and it was fine, and I actually had a really good time, and I thought you were really funny in it… But, you know, have a little manners here, sir!”
2.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Bill Hader and Jay Pharoah agreed that Justin Bieber was the worst-behaved SNL host they had. Bill said, “He was just in a bad place. Maybe he’s in a better place, but then… It was rough… He just seemed, like, exhausted or at the end of a rope. He was just so huge.”
3.
Taran Killam called the week Donald Trump hosted “rough.” He told NPR, “It was not enjoyable at the time and something that only grows more embarrassing and shameful as time goes on. I don’t necessarily put so much weight into [the idea of] Trump hosting SNL helping him become president, but there’s definitely something where it normalizes him, and it makes it OK for him to be part of the conversation. And I don’t think the intention of having him on was ever politically based. I sincerely believe that. But I don’t think it was considered — the implications that it had then and could have moving forward. And I think looking back…there’s nothing good I can take from that week. Because he’s not an enjoyable person to be around — he’s from a different class; he’s from a different way of life. There was never any common ground.”
4.
On Watch What Happens Live, David Spade called out host Steven Seagal. He said, “He was a little tough. He was actually tough, and he was tough to work with. It was hard. He did not want to play along.”
A year after Steven Seagal hosted, executive producer Lorne Michaels joked about him in Nicolas Cage’s monologue.
5.
Terry Sweeney told Live from New York, “Chevy hosted the second show, and we were all so excited because, to us, Chevy was like a god; this was someone returning who’d been one of the original people and was this legendary figure. And when he got there, he was a monster. I mean, he insulted everybody. He said to Robert Downey Jr., ‘Didn’t your father used to be a successful director? What ever happened to him? Boy, he sure died, you know, he sure went to hell.’ Downey turned ashen. And then Chevy turned to me, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re the gay guy, right?’ And he goes, ‘I’ve got an idea for a sketch for you. How about we say you have AIDS and we weigh you every week?’ I don’t know what he was on or what was happening to him mentally, but he was just crazy.”
Chevy Chase’s poor behavior as host wasn’t new. In the week leading up to the former cast member’s first hosting stint in 1978, tension brewed between him and Bill Murray. It reached a head right before the live broadcast began. Moments before the cold open, Chevy confronted Bill in his dressing room, and they got into a physical fight (though the only person who actually got hit was John Belushi, who helped break it up).
Decades later, cast members still despised him as a host. In Live from New York, Will Ferrell said, “The worst host was Chevy Chase. I don’t know if he was on something, but he was just kind of going around the room and systematically riffing. First, it was on the guys, playfully making fun, until, when he got to one of our female writers, he made some reference like, ‘Maybe you can give me a hand job later.’ In hindsight, I wish we’d all gotten up and walked out of the room. I think you’ll find a consensus on the Chevy Chase thing.”
During rehearsals in 1997, Chevy reportedly hit Cheri Oteri’s head. This, finally, was the last straw, and he hasn’t been permitted to host the show since.
6.
Tina Fey told Howard Stern that host Paris Hilton was “a piece of shit.” She said, “I think people were like, ‘Maybe she’ll be fun, you know. She won’t take herself too seriously.’ She takes herself super seriously… She’s so dumb. She’s so proud of how dumb she is.”
When Howard asked her what made Paris “a nightmare, specifically at Saturday Night Live,” Tina said, “People never come in and say, like, ‘I’m not doing that’ or whatever. This guy, Jim Downey, wrote this really, really funny sketch. It was Lorne just finding out she had a sex tape and being like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about this. You can’t host the show. We have standards here.’ And she was like, ‘I’m not doing it.’ She wouldn’t come out of her dressing room. Nobody does that stuff. Also, we would walk down the hall, and you’d find just, like, a nasty wad of what looked like Barbie hair on the stairs. You’d be like, ‘This came off her head?'”
7.
Bobby Moynihan told the podcast Thanks Dad with Ego Nwodim that, in his life, the “most overwhelming feelings” included his parents’ deaths, the knowledge that his own children will have to experience his death, and “when Jane Lynch had one of [his] sketches cut on SNL” in 2010. He said, “I still want to kill her to this day.”
His sketch was initially scheduled right after “Weekend Update,” but its card on Lorne Michaels’s board was replaced. Bobby said, “It just says Suze Orman Show. And it was, like, a political sketch where Jane Lynch was playing Suze Orman that kinda tanked or whatever… I don’t remember how it did, to be honest… [Jane] just kind of leaned over and whispered, ‘Sorry, Suze Orman’s a friend of mine.’ And I was, like, devastated.”
8.
Cast member Nora Dunn and musical guest Sinéad O’Connor boycotted SNL the week that Andrew Dice Clay hosted in 1990. Nora told Salon, “[He] was an abuser of women, and he was a homophobe. And his material was terrible. He just wasn’t smart enough to handle that material. And our writing staff was not the writing staff to handle that material either [for him to host the show]. Lorne said, ‘Andrew Dice Clay was a phenomenon worth examining.’ And yeah, he was a phenomenon, but if you’re going to examine him, he shouldn’t be the host; you should write an article. We didn’t examine the hosts of SNL. We supported them, we wrote for them, and we made them look good. Otherwise, you’d never get a host.”
9.
In his stand-up special Alive from New York, Pete Davidson said, “So Louis C.K. tried to get me fired from SNL my first year, and this is that story. So it’s, like, 2014 or ’15, and it’s the finale of SNL. And I was so shocked and happy that I didn’t get fired… Louis C.K. was like a very well-respected comedian, like, at the time. But yeah, at the time, he was someone that you would look up to and want approval of at the time. At the time, it was someone you wanted to be nice to you. Anyway, so he was hosting, and I was just thrilled. So I smoked a joint in my dressing room. And as I was leaving to go into the elevators, Louis C.K. was, like, holding court and talking to, like, a bunch of the cast and writers and, like, cool people, and they were, like, clearly very into a conversation.”
He continued, “So I was just like, ‘I don’t want any part of that.’ Like, you know, I’m high. I don’t want to, like, ruin it for anybody, or I don’t want that guy to know I exist, you know? So I just put my hoodie on, and I closed it really tight, and I walked all the way around to the other side of the elevators so I could not, you know, be in the way at all. And so I pressed the button, and I’m just waiting there. And then all of a sudden, Louis C.K. stops this conversation. He looks up and points at me and goes, ‘Look how fucking high Pete is that fucking idiot! Just getting fucking high at work, you stupid fuck! You’re gonna smoke your career away, idiot!’ I was so high, I was like, ‘That didn’t happen.’ No, this is a me issue for sure. He probably said, ‘See you tomorrow, champ.'”
“So I go to work the next day, and I get a phone call from Lorne Michaels’s office. This was alarming because I’ve been there for a year, and I have yet to hear from his office until today. So I was like, oh, shit, you know, so I answer the phone. And they’re like, ‘Hey, Louis just left Lorne’s office. He went in there to talk about you. And now Lorne wants to talk to you now.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. All right.’ You know, because I was like, ‘Now I’m getting fired.’ … So I was walking into his office just trying to feel better and whatever. And I open the door, and Lorne’s sitting there. Right. And he looks really confused, as do I, because, you know, I was just, like, how I look. You know, I look like, you know, you just asked me to, like, divide. Anyway, so, he looks very confused, and he’s like, ‘Sit down,’ so I do. And he goes, ‘So Louis came in and told me that you smoke weed,'” Pete said.
“And I was like, ‘Yes, the rumors that you have heard ring true.’ And then I saw with his eyes, he kind of looked deflated, like he didn’t know what to say, you know, like with his eyes, he’s like, ‘I’m sorry, we’re having this conversation, but Louis told on you, and he told me to talk to you. And like, you know, personally, I don’t think this is a big deal because people used to do coke here. And I kind of think you’re a pussy, actually. So I’m really sorry we’re having this conversation, you know.’ And I read that with his eyes, and with my eyes, I said, ‘No doubt, homie.’ It was just, like, awkward for another second, and it was quiet, and then he goes, ‘Yes. So I guess, you know, what you could do is, I guess, you know, because he said you smoke a lot of weed, so maybe you could just, like, watch the amount of weed that you smoke.'”
10.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Jane Curtin said that “there were so many” bad hosts, but she name-dropped Walter Matthau. She said, “It was disrespecting our space, and it really pissed me off.”
11.
Jay Pharoah told Watch What Happens Live, “I saw [musical guest] Kanye [West] yank somebody. That was pretty hilarious. Kanye went like this [pulled] and got dude in place. I was like, ‘Ha ha ha!'”
The week after musical guest Kanye West performed in a MAGA hat and went on a pro-Trump rant, Pete Davidson addressed the incident on “Weekend Update.” He said, “First off, a lot of people thought [Michael] Che should be the one to talk about Kanye, but we discussed it. Che’s Black, but I’m crazy, and we both know which side of Kanye’s at the wheel right now. Speaking strictly for myself, what Kanye said after we went off the air last week was one of the worst, most awkward things I’ve ever seen here, and I’ve seen Chevy Chase speak to an intern… He wore [the MAGA hat] all week. Nobody told him not to wear it. I wish I bullied you. I wish I would have suggested that it might upset some people, like your wife or every Black person ever.”
Additionally, Chris Redd later told the Daily Beast, “I remember the dress rehearsal where he tried his dress rehearsal version of that, and I heard it, but there was music playing still, so people were like sitting there and vibing. But I was listening to his words, and I was like, bro, he’s about to pull some bullshit. And I’m not about to be on stage for that. I’m not going to entertain this. Like, I’ve been a fan of Kanye my whole life. And I miss the old Kanye… But he came in there wanting to shoot everybody — verbally — and I just felt that was disrespectful, because we’re all grown adults. And now, all of us don’t like you. He just came in there with a chip on his shoulder, ready to talk shit.”
12.
Telling LateNighter about her least favorite host, Laraine Newman said, “I don’t like to say, but his name rhymes with Hilton Hurl.” This was a reference to Milton Berle, aka “Mr. Television.”
Previously, she told Cracked, “Jane [Curtin], Gilda [Radner] and I were standing with him during blocking, and he said, ‘Give me a little two-step,’ which is a tap-dancing move that none of us knew. He said, ‘You don’t know a two-step? Where’s your talent?’ It was so crushing because I grew up with him on TV, and I loved Uncle Milty. That was really wounding at the time.”
13.
In Live from New York, writer David Sheffield said, “My vote for worst host is Robert Blake. He was sitting in a room, and a sketch was handed to him by Gary Kroeger, who was a writer-actor — a sketch called ‘Breezy Philosopher,’ a one-premise sketch about a lofty teacher who’s kind of a biker tough guy, talking about Kierkegaard. Students kept asking questions while he combed his hair, and he’d say, ‘Hey, I don’t know.’ Blake sat there and read that, with his glasses down his nose, then wadded it up, turned to Kroeger, and said, ‘I hope you got a tough asshole, pal, ’cause you’re going to have to wipe your ass with that one.’ And he threw it and bounced it off Gary’s face.”
14.
And finally, Paula Abdul has never hosted SNL, but Tina Fey told Playboy that the singer’s scheduled cameo appearance “was awful” and a “disaster.” She said, “In the ways she generally appears to be. It was an American Idol sketch, and she wanted to change parts. So Amy Poehler had to play her… A year later, I saw her on a flight. We both looked at each other like, ‘Do I know that girl?’ And then we both had the same moment of recognition, and she was like ‘uuuggh.’ I saw it register on her face that she had had a terrible time with us… I was pregnant at the time and probably a little moody, but I remember thinking, ‘She’s a disaster! I gotta prop this lady up and get her on TV.'”
In your opinion, who’s the worst ever Saturday Night Live host? Why? Tell us in the comments or in the anonymous comments box below!
