SNL Gone Wild: 13 Behind the Scenes Stories From the Nearly 50 Years of Saturday Night Live

As recounted by Nick De Semlyen in his terrific book Wild and Crazy Guys, Bill Murray punched Chevy Chase when Chase returned to host the eleventh episode of Season 3 on Feb. 18, 1978.

Murray had replaced Chase after the latter left the show in the middle of Season 2, and the SNL team felt that Chase “had deserted them,” Semlyen writes. His return, the author adds, “was leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.”

Murray and Chase talked smack at each other prior to the taping, and finally Murray slugged the host. That escalated into “a huge altercation,” according to John Landis, an eyewitness quoted in the book. “They were big guys and really going at it.” Murray, however, described it as “really a Hollywood fight; a don’t-touch-my-face kinda thing.”

The show went on. And Chase and Murray reunited, amicably enough, for 1980’s Caddyshack (above).

Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels went to pretty ridiculous lengths to convince NBC executives to let Richard Pryor, the comedy star of the moment, host the show’s seventh episode on Dec. 13, 1975.

Because the network feared Pryor was too profane and unpredictable, Michaels agreed to a five-second delay so that any curse words could be beeped — marking the first time that Saturday Night Live wasn’t live when it first aired. Pryor avoided any four-letter words, but did use a three-letter word that rhymes with sass, twice.

According to Saturday Night, A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingard, the censor who was running the delay device let both uses of the word slip by. But both were edited out of the taped version broadcast on the West Coast.

What did make it to air is a classic “word association” sketch that is far more shocking to modern ears than the three-letter word that was censored.

Chevy Chase, who was on the show from 1975-76, recalled last year that John Belushi once stole his drugs.

“Back then, the big drug was cocaine,” Chase said on the Club Random With Bill Maher podcast. “Obviously John turned out to be a cokehead but I had a little jar of cocaine with a little spoon that hung from it. Anyway, I had it on the piano of the stage. So I’m just playing the piano, the crowd isn’t in yet, and it’s just sitting. After I played just a little bit, it’s gone. I had no idea how. Obviously I was looking at my hands at the moment that John swooped in and took it. So I immediately said, ‘Belushi, did you take my coke?’ ‘No, what are you talking about?'”

A month later, Chase was invited to dinner at the home of Belushi and his wife — “and I see my little vial empty and washed, just sitting on a shelf by the books.”

Belushi died of a heroin and cocaine overdose in 1982.

Charles Rocket was in the cast of the very rough 1980-81 season that followed the exit of all the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, as well as SNL creator Lorne Michaels (who returned to the show in the middle of the ’80s.)

As SNL fans know, Rocket is best known on the show for a flub during a February 21, 1981 segment inspired by the famed Dallas storyline “Who Shot J.R.?.” Rocket used a curse word on air: “It’s the first time I’ve ever been shot in my life. I’d like to know who the f— did it.” (Note the reactions the instant after he said it, above.)

According to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, SNL producer Jean Doumanian, who had been hired to replace Lorne, went on a long campaign to save Rocket’s job.

She and Rocket went to a series of meetings with NBC executives, in which they apologized again and again — sometimes laughing about it afterwards. At one point, according to the book, Doumanian told an executive, “If you’re going to fire him, you can fire me.”

Soon after, NBC fired them both — not just because of the incident, but because of a general sense that the show wasn’t doing well.

Ironically, Rocket made his flub after a monologue in which host Charlene Tilton, a star of Dallas, joked about how many people on the show had “tried to take advantage of me.”

“The only one I trust is Charlie Rocket!” she announced.

Before Jeff Daniels hosted the Oct. 5, 1991 episode, he did something many hosts do: went into the makeup department to get a face mask made.

As SNL star David Spade explained in his terrific memoir, Almost Interesting, “if the makeup department wants to make a dummy that looks like you, or there needs to be a shot of your head blowing up, a plaster-like substance is poured on your face to create a mold that can be used to sculpt a replica.”

The process involves placing a stocking cap over the person’s head, and inserting two straws so they can breathe through the nose as the substance hardens over the face. It usually takes 15 minutes.

But Daniels’ mask had hardened so much it wouldn’t come off, Spade explained. He added that Lorne Michaels had a plastic surgeon hurry to 30 Rock, and that the plaster was peeled off Daniels’ face. At one point the surgeon needed to use an X-Acto knife, cutting Daniels’ eyebrows and eyelashes. But the mask finally came off, and Daniels went through with the episode the next night.

“If you watch that old show, you can see his eyebrows were painted on,” Spade wrote.

That’s Daniels with Dana Carvey, left, at the start of the episode. We honestly wouldn’t have noticed.

The late, great Chris Farley was one of the funniest people ever to be on SNL, and a bona fide movie star for films like Tommy Boy. Backstage, he was a relentless prankster who loved crossing lines.

Mike Myers recalled on the Fly on the Wall podcast recalled a long, very weird running joke, in which Farley would regularly join him, uninvited, in the shower, pressing his body into Myers’ and declaring his love for him.

“I’d beat on him. I’d go ‘Farley, get the f— out of here! Get the f— out!’ I couldn’t hit him very hard because it was so funny,” Myers recalled.

But Farley did it week after week, and Myers was so distracted by the demands of the show that he never expected it.

“Every week I forgot — you’d think you’d remember every week,” Myers added. The reason he didn’t remember, Myers explained, was that he was so distracted by the work involved in the show.

When Andrew Dice Clay (right, with Jon Lovitz), known for his misogynist in-character routine, was brought in to host the May 12, 1990 episode, cast member Nora Dunn protested by opting not to perform.

So did the scheduled musical guest, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor.

Ironically, it wasn’t Clay who turned out to be responsible for one of the wildest moments in the history of Saturday Night Live — it was one of the women who protested him.

Even casual SNL or music fans know what happened two years later, when O’Connor finally appeared on SNL as the musical guest of the October 3, 1992 episode: After a stunning a capella performance of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor declared “fight the real enemy!” and tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II in a protest of abuse in the Catholic Church.

The backlash was immediate and widespread. Less known is a silly anecdote about David Spade, who had witnessed the moment from the side of the stage. He recalled in his aforementioned entertaining memoir, Almost Interesting, that he had “sort of flirted” with O’Conner when she was in Studio 8H that week, but decided after the incident, “I wouldn’t try to sleep with her since she was now a worldwide pariah.”

But that isn’t the ridiculous part of the story. The ridiculous part is that Spade had up a piece of the torn photo as a souvenir, and that Sunday night, while doing laundry, saw an Inside Edition report about the incident, with the entire photo reassembled… except for his piece.

Spade said SNL producer Kenny Aymong, joined by two security guards, told Spade: “You might have something that belongs to us.” Spade handed over his piece of the photo.

“I learned soon after that a member of the crew had stolen the ripped-up photo off the floor and sold it to Inside Edition for ten thousand dollars,” Spade wrote. “He was fired, but security thought that I might be in on it.” He wasn’t.

Pranks abounded behind the scenes on SNL in the ’90s — and not all were appreciated.

Chris Kattan (above) told Howard Stern that Norm MacDonald would sometimes belittle him for playing so many effeminate characters, which he didn’t appreciate. Things came to an odd crescendo on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City. Neither realized they would both end up on the flight.

“It was a red eye. He was behind me and we were getting along, whatever,” said Kattan, adding that MacDonald was making very loud, crude jokes. “I’m laughing because he’s a funny guy.”

Kattan fell asleep, and when he woke up, realized his shoe was missing.

“He stole my shoe,” Kattan recalled.

Later, he responded by stealing MacDonald’s jacket on an especially cold night.

This one is about the ridiculousness of certain 1990s NBC executives.

Standup comedian Norm MacDonald was a fearless anchor of “Weekend Update” who delighted in crossing lines. But he went to far for NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer by delivering years of jokes calling Ohlmeyer’s friend, O.J. Simpson, a murderer.

Both MacDonald and SNL writer Jim Downey feuded with Ohlmeyer, who insisted MacDonald just wasn’t funny. Both MacDonald and Downey were fired in 1998, and it’s been a longstanding SNL story that MacDonald was fired over the jokes.

But Downey revealed earlier this year on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend that MacDonald could have saved his own job — if he had agreed to throw Downey under the bus. MacDonald refused.

Downey told O’Brien: “The network went to Norm and said, ‘We want to get rid of Jim Downeyand we just want you to know. You’re cool with that, right?’ And he said, ‘No. No. You can’t fire him. If you fire him, I quit.’ … He said, ‘I’m not doing it without him.'”

Talk about a standup guy.

Downey said MacDonald, who died in 2021, never told Downey how he’d stood up for him — Downey says he only learned about it, years later, from NBC executives.

Less than two years after his exit, Norm MacDonald was invited back to Saturday Night Live to host the October 23, 1999 episode. He noted how strange it was that he would be invited back.

“They fired me because they said that I wasn’t funny,” he noted. “It’s only a year and a half later, and now, they ask me to host the show. So I wondered, how did I go from being not funny enough to be even allowed in the building, to being so funny that I’m now hosting the show?”

He added: “Then it occurred to me, I haven’t gotten funnier — the show has gotten really bad! … So let’s recap. The bad news is: I’m still not funny. The good news is: The show blows!”

When Will Ferrell was called in for a meeting with Lorne Michaels after a successful audition, he decided he’d try to seal the deal with a comic bit in Michaels’ office. He arrived at the meeting with “a briefcase full of counterfeit money that I’d bought at a toy store,” Ferrell told The New York Times.

“And in the middle of whatever Lorne was going to say, I was going to start stacking the equivalent of $25,000 on his desk: ‘Listen, Lorne, you and I can say whatever we want to say. But we really know what talks, and that’s money. I’m going to walk out of this room, and you can either take this money or not. And I can be on the show.’”

But Ferrell never found a moment to make the joke, he said, because “it was just not a joking atmosphere. It was just tense. And I never get to do my gag.”

He did get hired, though.

Many people have been fired from SNL, but Shane Gillis may be the only performer to be fired before his first show.

SNL announced that comedian Shane Gillis would join the show for its 45th season in 2019 — but internet sleuths quickly surfaced audio from Gillis’ podcast.

On an episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, which Gillis co-hosted with comedian Matt McCusker — Gillis used a racial slur and made fun of Chinese accents during a discussion about Chinatown. SNL acted swiftly.

“After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL,” a spokesperson said on behalf of SNL producer Lorne Michaels. “We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show … The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to our standard.”

Gillis said at the time of his firing (or is it un-hiring?):

“I’m a comedian who was funny enough to get on SNL. That can’t be taken away. Of course, I wanted an opportunity to prove myself at SNL but it would be too much of a distraction. I respect the decision they made. I am honestly grateful for the opportunity.”

He later explained on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast that he had been trying to make fun of racist attitudes, not encourage them.

Gillis has landed on his feet. He’s a very successful comedian with a new Netflix special, Beautiful Dogs. And SNL invited him back this year, to host the February 24 episode.

You may also like this List of the 15 Best SNL Characters (featuring the Bronx Beat ladies, above) or this list of the 15 Best SNL Sketches.