Comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer John Mulaney made it clear he has “zero to do” with the new movie Saturday Night this week on Late Night With Seth Meyers. But that didn’t stop him from brutally mocking the very existence of director Jason Reitman’s upcoming film that tells the story of the iconic sketch show’s first night on the air.
“There’s a lot of really interesting moments,” he told Meyers on Late Night about the film—and even though he hasn’t seen the movie (“I saw the trailer,” he quipped), he joked that read the script and had a few thoughts. “I read this scene [and] I thought we could read it together,” he said as he presented Meyers a printed excerpt. “When you hear it, your hair will stand up on your neck,” Mulaney joked.
Reading from the scene, which Meyers told the audience is “young Lorne [Michaels] hailing a cab,” Mulaney read the Lorne character’s lines while Meyers read the cab driver’s. “Take me to Rockefeller Center. I’m gonna go do Saturday Night Live, a new show on NBC,” Mulaney read.
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“TV at night? That’ll never work,” Meyers read back.
“F--- you you f---ing dumb cabbie. It’ll be so famous and good at sketch comedy,” Mulaney responded, sarcastically concluding that the “the stakes are high” in the film.
Saturday Night follows the first ever SNL cast on the fateful night of October 11, 1975, when the show first premiered live on NBC, and will be released in theaters on that same date this fall. It stars Gabriel LaBelle (of Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans fame) as Michaels along with several other hot, young actors like Rachel Sennott, Corey Michael Smith and Cooper Hoffman.
Mulaney, since his launching career with the show as a writer from 2008 to 2013, has hosted the show five times, becoming part of its famous Five Timers Club. In reference to the film, which is being billed as a “comedy thriller,” he joked on Late Night, “I worked for five years at Saturday Night Live, but I had no idea the pressure cooker it was.”
