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Saturday Night Live alums are grappling with an age-old question: does Lorne Michaels find Lorne Michaels impressions funny?
Fred Armisen, Mikey Day, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Kattan, Jon Lovitz, Bobby Moynihan, Kevin Nealon, and Laraine Newman all guest on Thursday’s special ep of SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show in anticipation of SNL 50: The Anniversary Special next week. In an exclusive clip from the episode, the gang of former and current cast members discuss several amusing anecdotes about the notoriously straight-faced SNL boss.
“I wanna know: Does anyone know at what point Lorne had a sense of humor about people doing him?” Kattan asks the group.
Moynihan shares an unfortunate story that kinda clarifies the matter. “Have any of you ever done it in front of him by accident? I did,” he says. “I was at one of the host dinners, and I was just explaining something, and I went, ‘Yeah, and Lorne came up to me and said, [impersonating Michaels] “Well, you know, Bobby.”‘ And I kinda just did it.”
The performer, who was on the show from 2008 to 2017, says that the table went awkwardly silent for a moment, but that Michaels ultimately embraced the gag in his own way. “And it got really quiet for a second, and he just went, ‘Continue.'”
Dana Edelson/NBC
Gasteyer adds that she’s only witnessed one former cast member jokingly disrespect Michaels to the same extent. “I was sitting next to Mark McKinney once when he pretended to fall asleep, like, pretty obviously, while Lorne was talking about architecture from Toronto,” she recalls. “It was at a dinner, and McKinney went [snore]. I’d never seen anybody go that boldly up against the king.”
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Lovitz also recalls Dana Carvey crafting an entire sketch just to mess with Michaels. “At the read-through, Lorne reads all the directions and everything,” he explains. “Dana wrote a sketch that had no chance of getting on. The whole point of the sketch — it was called ‘Funny Little Poopy Head’ — and the whole point of the sketch was to make Lorne say ‘Funny Little Poopy Head’ over and over again. And no one was laughing, but I was dying, because that was the whole point of it.”
Listen to Stern’s SNL on Stern Roundtable special on SiriusXM at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET/4 p.m. and 7 p.m. PT. Watch the full clip from the episode above.
