Comedy

“You walk down the hall, there's a llama,” Hammond says, regarding the surreality of day-to-day life at SNL. “There's Nicole Kidman. Hey, that's Tom Cruise. Is that Cam Newton? Hey, LeBron just walked by.”

SNL performers past and present recall ideas too out-there to make it past table read, seemingly hilarious concepts that bombed at dress rehearsal, and would-be classics cut for time.

“By the nature of it being live, it's immediate and it's probably riskier,” Gasteyer says of SNL. “There's not a lot of time spent hand-wringing and wondering if someone's going to be offended.”

From hot-tubbing with John Malkovich to David Pumpkins, Belushi to Beavis & Butthead, Saturday Night Live players past and present recall their finest, funniest, most absurd moments on the SNL stage.

“This is a monologue into the darkness and your boss is watching,” says SNL's Michael Che. “It’s like a nightmare.”

“The show was in a bad place,” Carvey recalls. “I was told if we don't hit the ground running, they'll pull the plug at Christmas.”

To mark the anniversary of a cultural institution, GQ conducted a series of interviews with SNL legends and newcomers alike. Here’s how they responded to a question no one wanted to answer.

With her star turn on Hacks, the comic turned actor has established herself as one of Hollywood’s most exciting young talents—much to her own surprise.

In January, the comic delivered an instantly iconic podcast interview that threw pop culture into crisis—and seemed to predict all manner of messy celebrity gossip to come. At home on his farm, Williams explains why he said what he said—and why he’d do it again, and again, and again....

After immortalizing the whirlwind of the last four years—relapse, intervention, recovery—in his award-winning stand-up special, John Mulaney has emerged as one of the most popular comedians on earth. For his next trick, he’s embracing his surprising new role as a Southern California family man.

It's one of the most crowd-pleasing film genres of all time—and despite the success of films like Anyone But You and The Idea of You, Hollywood has all but given up on it. But the author of Nora Ephron at the Movies, a new book on the creator of When Harry Met Sally, believes that can change.

You may know him from TikTok as the “Luckily, I have purse” guy or his podcast with Brooke Averick (“AI could never do the dumb, dumb conversations that we have”). But more and more people are catching Wood at his sold-out stand-up shows.

Ellen DeGeneres has said she’s leaving show business but can’t leave well enough alone. GQ columnist and standup-special aficionado Chris Black reviews her Netflix mea minima culpa.

A self-described “rich kid” from Manhattan who’s known online for his viral crowd work clips, Zelnick is actually building his career the old-fashioned way: Performing in American cities like Plano, Texas, for lefty young people and “eight 64-year-old Republicans sitting in the back, having a straight-up bad time.”

The brilliant comedy-drama brings a grip of late-aughts signifiers—AIM chats, Facebook wall posts, Verizon Ringback Tones, Warped Tour bands—to the big screen in the most painfully accurate and hilarious way possible. Director Sean Wang tells GQ what it took to recreate an oft-overlooked period for his first feature film.

The heart-surgeon-turned-comedian, who brought political satire to Middle Eastern television, reflects on his viral Piers Morgan appearance, his bilingual comedy tour, and whether he's funnier in English or Arabic.