Former Saturday Night Live star Kevin Nealon has called out the show’s cast for breaking into laughter during live performances, saying it “doesn’t work for the sketch” and undermines the writing.
The former Weekend Update anchor didn’t name anyone in particular, but his comment comes shortly after a season 51 episode hosted by Ryan Gosling saw both him and SNL member Ashley Padilla repeatedly break character during the ‘Passing Notes’ sketch.
“I never broke character on SNL,” Nealon wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I knew how much time the writers put into those scripts. You don’t want to be the one who throws it off. Lorne doesn’t like when the cast breaks. Even if the audience laughs, it doesn’t work for the sketch.”
Nealon was a cast member from 1986 to 1995 and anchored Weekend Update between 1991 and 1994.
“If I could get through the Chippendales sketch, I could get through anything,” he added, referencing the iconic season 16 sketch he was in with Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze, where the latter audition to be dancers.
Gosling, who was hosting SNL for the fourth time, has developed a reputation for breaking during sketches, which has been increasingly folded into the show’s live format. On “Passing Notes”, the actor and Padilla played a school principal and a teacher, respectively, intercepting notes being passed around by students.
In the sketch, as Padilla grabbed the first note from Mikey Day, a prompt appeared on-screen for viewers reading: “The contents of these notes have been changed since rehearsal.”
This saw Padilla and Gosling reading the jokes for the first time, live on stage, leading to repeated breaks from both actors.
SNL head Lorne Michaels is famously known to prefer that cast members and hosts stay in character and not break during skits.
Breaking has long been part of the show’s history and controversy. Talk show host Jimmy Fallon, who was a cast member from 1998 to 2004, became known for laughing through sketches. He drew criticism for it from fellow SNL cast member Tracy Morgan, who said in a 2011 interview with Penthouse that Fallon “laughing and all that dumb [bleep] he used to do” bothered his other castmates.
“That’s taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I’m the cute one,’” he said.
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Gosling has admitted, “I get in trouble a lot for laughing on the show,” adding that he’s often told: “You laugh too much. You and Fallon.”
Breaking has nevertheless persisted across eras of the show, despite repeated criticism. During Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary special in 2015, a pre-recorded digital short titled That’s When You Break saw Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg perform a musical tribute to cast members breaking on air, with a montage of clips from across the show’s history and calling out frequent offenders like Fallon and Horatio Sanz.
