Saturday Night Live has been home to over a hundred cast members throughout the past 37 years. In our column Saturday Night’s Children, we present the history, talent, and best sketches of one SNL cast member each week for your viewing, learning, and laughing pleasure.
SNL's first gay black female repertory player Danitra Vance joined during the show's eleventh season, and though she had a background as a classically trained Shakespearian actor, Second City performer, and recent Off-Broadway favorite, she spent her single season stint mostly relegated to black bit parts. That fact, along with the transitional and tumultuous nature of Michaels's first season back at SNL, often overshadows [...]
Saturday Night Live has been home to over a hundred cast members throughout the past 36 years. In our column Saturday Night’s Children, we present the history, talent, and best sketches of one SNL cast member each week for your viewing, learning, and laughing pleasure.
She'll always be identified with Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, but not many people recognize Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the young television newcomer she was on early-80s SNL. Before going on to star in a string of critically acclaimed shows, Louis-Dreyfus spent three years as a repertory player during the Dick Ebersol days developing characters and paving her quick path to stardom. Since then, she's dominated [...]
Saturday Night Live has been home to over a hundred cast members throughout the past 36 years. In our column Saturday Night’s Children, we present the history, talent, and best sketches of one SNL cast member each week for your viewing, learning, and laughing pleasure.
For such an Italian-Canadian SCTV character success, it's surprising that Tony Rosato and his larger-than-life delivery — compared in his early days to that of John Belushi (who he also impersonated) — never made much of a splash during his run on SNL from 1981-1982. The producer/cast member shake-ups of the early 1980s and the 1981 Writer's Guild of America Strike can soak up [...]
Saturday Night Live has been home to over a hundred cast members throughout the past 36 years. In our column Saturday Night’s Children, we present the history, talent, and best sketches of one SNL cast member each week for your viewing, learning, and laughing pleasure.
Most of SNL's best known impressionists aren't lauded for their numbers or accuracy, but their flavor, or what Darrell Hammond calls in Live from New York the "bastardization" they bring to their subjects — think Eddie Murphy's hot tubbin' James Brown, Dana Carvey's "Notgonnadoit" George H. W. Bush, and Hammond's skeevy Sean Connery in the "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketches, none of which necessarily capture [...]
Saturday Night Live has been home to over a hundred cast members throughout the past 36 years. In our column Saturday Night’s Children, we present the history, talent, and best sketches of one SNL cast member each week for your viewing, learning, and laughing pleasure.
There are many short-lived cast members who talk trash about the backroom politics and airtime struggles at SNL, but Jay Mohr literally wrote the book on it. In fairness to Mohr, standing out on the show was a tall order for any new player up against a huge cast of veteran stars like Farley, Hartman, and Sandler, and though he did find some grounding [...]
