Here's a new video SNL put out, in which freshman cast members Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett discuss their favorite moments from their inaugural season: all of which are just them hugging each other and goofing around during the end credits goodbye.
Austin-based giant arts festival South by Southwest (SXSW) just announced the comedy portion of its 2014 lineup. Here's a rundown of what the festival will feature:
We've reached the midpoint of SNL's 39th season — one that has optimistically been called a "transitional year," but one more commonly known as "the year the shit hit the fan with that whole black woman issue." Despite the fact that the bulk of the SNL coverage in fall 2013 has zeroed in on the show's diversity controversy, SNL has given us plenty of other things to talk about, from new cast members and emerging stars on the show, to surprise cameos and celebrity hosts who defied our expectations — in good and bad ways.
Unfortunately, few of those topics have gotten much ink in fall 2013 (outside of sites [...]
Season 39 of SNL kicks off this Saturday night with Tina Fey, Arcade Fire, and a mouthful of new names for Don Pardo to read off in the opening credits. After several seasons of little turnover, the cast is experiencing a major upheaval, with six — six! — new cast members to replace the departed Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, and Fred Armisen. This is the largest staff hire in 18 years, tying the 1995-1996 season's addition of Jim Breuer, Will Ferrell, Darrell Hammond, David Koechner, Cheri Oteri, and Nancy Walls. After the show's dismal 1994-1995 season, which saw near cancellation and the firing/resignation of 12 cast members, those six were [...]
Deadline is reporting that SNL has four top candidates to add to the cast as featured players for the fall. While NBC has yet to announce the news, the report says that Beck Bennett, John Milhiser, Kyle Mooney, and Noël Wells are "heavily rumored to land the coveted SNL spots." All four are performers from Los Angeles's Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and each one has a series of popular web videos to his or her name. Milhiser is a member of the video sketch group Serious Lunch, Wells is known for her solo videos, and Mooney and Bennett both come from the sketch group Good Neighbor, which also [...]
With SNL's 39th season coming to a close, we're taking a look at the past season with a series of posts examining the highs, lows, and other memorable moments from the past eight months. Here we recall some of our favorite sketches from the season — both live sketches and videos.
Season 39 of SNL certainly hasn't been the most popular among viewers, with its first half bogged down with criticism over the lack of diversity in the cast, and its second half attacked (often unfairly) for uneven writing under new head writer Colin Jost. Even though the show hired Sasheer Zamata (along with two black female writers), and the script [...]
In August, Saturday Night Live hired actors Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett and director Dave McCary from the sketch group Good Neighbor, and in this weekend's Jonah Hill-hosted episode of SNL, they brought some characters from their web videos to the show. The last sketch of the night — a slot that's been reserved for Good Neighbor videos for most of the season — was called "Inside SoCal," and Mooney and Bennett have been doing their characters, Todd and Casey, for three years now. Mooney, who grew up in San Diego and is adept at precisely making fun of the dialogue and mannerisms of Southern California guys, wrote the original [...]
I never thought we would see the day when SNL considered itself newsworthy enough to parody. But it happened — not in the form of a quick joke during the monologue or Weekend Update, or a walk-on by Lorne Michaels, as has happened before — but with a whole cold open sketch, wherein host Kerry Washington was compelled to play numerous black female characters (Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce) because SNL literally had no one else who could do them. The meta-sketch also included a half-apologetic text scroll from the producers promising to fix the situation, unless they "fall in love with another white guy first," and a cameo by [...]
On Friday, we reported that SNL is hiring three members of the Los Angeles-based sketch group Good Neighbor for the 2013-14 season. Good Neighbor consists of writer/performers Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, and Nick Rutherford, who all met as students at USC, and Dave McCary, a childhood friend of Mooney's who's the group's director and editor. Mooney and Bennett have been hired by SNL as featured players and McCary as a video director, making this the second time the show has added multiple members of an existing video sketch group after The Lonely Island in 2005.
Founded in 2007, Good Neighbor quickly amassed millions of YouTube hits with their sketch videos [...]
Here's the latest video from comedian Kyle Mooney, in which he plays Southern California surfer named Todd who's grappling with a depression that no tall can or blunt can cure.
Last year, in his third time hosting SNL, Zach Galifianakis gave us a wonderful sketch called "Darrell's House." The sketch came in two parts. The first part was an odd piece that aired live early in the episode, with Galifianakis playing a public access TV show host who barked at an off-screen director to make various specific edits in post: remove a fight with his wife, insert a shot of a laughing crowd at the Apollo, etc. But it was the second part that was the true marvel. At the end of the night, SNL aired a recut version of the sketch with exactly all of the edits Galifianakis [...]
Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island were not the first to produce pre-recorded material for Saturday Night Live. The show has a long tradition of commercial parodies, short films by directors like Albert Brooks and Tom Schiller, and animated work like Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse sketches. They weren’t even the first to use the “SNL Digital Short” tag. What they did do, was usher SNL into the age of digital online content in a time when it needed to tap into that relevance more than ever. And because they were able to tap into the early rising of the online video tide, as well as produce work prodigiously [...]
Last month, Saturday Night Live hired everyone from the LA-based sketch group Good Neighbor onto the show except for member Nick Rutherford. Good Neighbor's Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett were hired as featured players, while Dave McCary was brought on as a director, with all of them set to debut on tomorrow night's season premiere. Rutherford, an actor/writer/standup, spoke about the situation publicly for the first time on the latest episode of DJ Douggpound's podcast, The Poundcast.
Rutherford tells his side of the story, explaining that he and Beck Bennett auditioned for Lorne Michaels individually at a showcase in LA this summer. Kyle Mooney had been flown [...]
In 2005, when SNL hired the three members of existing sketch group The Lonely Island — Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg, and Jorma Taccone — it was something that the show had never done before. But it sure worked, with the trio creating the SNL Digital Short format that became incredibly popular and injected new life into the show. Now, it looks like they're doing it again with the sketch group Good Neighbor, which consists of Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney, Nick Rutherford and Dave McCary. In addition to hiring Bennett and Mooney as featured players for the upcoming season, we've learned that SNL has also hired member McCary [...]
