Saturday Night Live is back this weekend, which means tonight is the worst night of the week for the cast and writers. As part of the show’s 50-year tradition — a relic that dates back to the original cast’s cocaine days — everyone will pull a Tuesday all-nighter to come up with brilliant sketches for Bad Bunny. At least they’ve had all summer to stash ideas in their Notes app.
To mark the occasion, Sarah Sherman showed up for Late Night With Seth Meyers dressed as “Writing Night,” an outfit featuring a dress with a writing paper pattern, paper clips in her hair, a huge pencil, a monster eraser “for really big mistakes” and binder clips nipping at her waist. The red fishnets are just for fun.
Despite the whimsical outfit, Sherman isn’t a fan of Writing Night. “It’s torture. It’s hell,” she confessed to Meyers. “You go to sleep with your eyes closed being like, ‘Think of something good. Think of a good idea. Think of something funny.’ And then you wake up the next morning with nothing. And then you crawl your sorry ass to work and you’re like, ‘Please, someone help me.’”
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The problem is that everyone else is in the same boat: sleep-deprived and devoid of brilliant ideas. That means pitching jokes on Wednesday can be torturous. There’s not much worse than being called on when the well of ideas has run dry. “You’re like, ‘Um, uh, a character called Poop Vampire who has a catchphrase, ‘I want to suck your butt.’”
Sherman has had her share of pitches that didn’t pan out. “You put the same effort into the ones that don’t work as the ones that do,” Meyers sympathized.
Sherman described how she’ll sometimes scribble an illustration for an idea, “like a psychopath serial killer,” then send it to SNL’s in-house animators to see if it can come to life. That happened the second time Timothée Chalamet hosted, with Sherman drawing out on a napkin how the actor might play her like a human instrument.
“Relax,” she told the tittering audience. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”
Meyers agreed, showing a photo to the audience that “couldn’t be less sexual.”
Sherman remembered staying up until five in the morning, laughing with the writers and imagining how funny the bit would be on the air. “Timothée Chalamet was gonna come out with this long gray wig and play this instrument,” she told Meyers. “Then the noises came out of my mouth. I was like, honk, honk! And then Bowen would come in and change my batteries by putting batteries in my mouth.”
And what came of that writing night idea?
“It bombed so hard you could hear butterflies flapping their wings in China.”
Honestly, that bit sounds less bonkers than Sherman’s Ant-Man parody idea when Paul Rudd hosted. In that sketch, she would have played a 100-year-old grandfather who asks Ant-Man to shrink down, enter his penis hole and blast his kidney stones with a laser. “Needless to say,” she conceded, “didn’t go to air.”
Whew. Say what you will about Sarah Sherman, but she doesn’t fall back on the same old SNL cliches. Here’s hoping she comes up with more weirdo ideas tonight.
