Matt Solomon
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Rachel Dratch was smart to be nervous around Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz. As immortalized in song by Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler at Saturday Night Live’s 40th birthday bash, Fallon and Sanz were notorious for their inability (or unwillingness) to keep a straight face during sketches. “These guys, they better not mess up my thing with cracking up,” Dratch remembered about her first Debbie Downer sketch in the oral history Live From New York.
Spoiler alert: Fallon and Sanz cracked up.
But they’re not the only ones. Here are the 10 craziest times that SNL sketches nearly got derailed by delirious laughter…
Bill Hader is in the SNL Crack-Up Hall of Fame, but he’s not the main culprit here. Super Spokesmodels Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph just can’t control themselves while driving a golf cart through a game show set.
It’s hard to blame Aidy Bryant for this one. Let’s point the finger at her wardrobe assistant, who picked an inopportune moment to initiate a costume change that was supposed to happen off-camera. Hey, it’s live television, folks.
Fallon didn’t need breaking-bad buddy Sanz to lose his composure in the face of the Lovahs. You can almost sense Will Ferrell smelling blood in the water, latching himself onto Fallon’s funny bone and refusing to let go.
The first time a Stefon bit went to dress rehearsal, Hader couldn’t keep a straight face. “He was apologizing because he has a strong work ethic and thinks it’s bad to mess up,” said writer John Mulaney in a Behind the Sketch interview. “And I think it’s very funny to mess up." Thus, Mulaney made it his mission to replace jokes in the teleprompter before every live Stefon performance to ensure Hader would lose it.
Sense a theme here? If Will Ferrell was in a sketch, there was a good chance his castmates would crack up. Host Seann William Scott is still scarred by this one, claiming he got a longer glimpse at Ferrell’s boys than he would have liked.
An underrated member of the SNL Crack-Up Hall of Fame? That’s Pete Davidson, who barely tries to stop convulsing with laughter during the seafood aria.
Does it seem like SNL crack-ups only began during the Will Ferrell years? The uncontrolled chuckles were fewer and farther between in the early days, but that didn’t stop Candice Bergen from succumbing to a giggle fit with Gilda Radner.
We knew Chris Farley was a star when he sent David Spade and Christina Applegate into hysterics in Matt Foley’s first appearance. Spade says Farley always held back a little something extra until the live show in an attempt to break his coworkers.
“Time moves so fast or so slow when you’re off the rails with something on the show,” Heidi Gardner told Vulture. “I was thinking to myself, You need to recover from this. I had coached myself for so many years to not break. I’ll never be able to shake looking over my shoulder and seeing what I saw. ”
“I think we were all just giddy,” said Dratch of this all-time crack-up fest. “It was just a random giggle fit that got completely contagious.”
