Bill Hader recalls Josh Brolin's rallying words before bombing 'horribly' on “SNL”: 'Let's shut these f---ers up'

"The whole show up until this point has been just fireworks. And we know we're gonna blow it."

Bill Hader killed the momentum of a historic Saturday Night Live episode — but host Josh Brolin made sure that his failure was unforgettable.

The Barry star reflected on a subpar 2008 SNL sketch involving a couple of gruff oddball characters, Jerry and Carl — whom he developed with castmate Will Forte — during a conversation with Ted Danson on his podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name. "It was about those two guys calling Josh Brolin's character, who I think his name was Jim Dever, saying 'We think you're a fart face,'" Hader recalled. "And Jim Dever — it's played very straight, like Arthur Miller or something — he would go, 'I'm not a fart face. I'm a very happy face. I'm a happy man.' And he starts crying, and then we say, 'We're gonna tell everybody you cried in our office.'"

The episode featured a legendary musical performance by Adele and one of the show's most memorable political cameos. "We did it at dress rehearsal, and this happened to be the show that Sarah Palin came to, and it was at that time the highest-rated SNL episode in the history of the show," Hader explained. "And we did a thing called Fart Face. We did it at dress [rehearsal], it played to absolute silence. I could hear my foot falls."

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Hader immediately knew that the sketch was doomed. "You can hear yourself breathing on the stage 'cause it's just bombing so bad," he said. "So we left, and we were like, 'Well, that's never happening.'" But the sketch gained an unlikely champion: "Lorne Michaels, I don't know why, took a real shine to it, and we went into the meeting, and he somehow moved it up in the order. It was right after [Weekend] Update. And he had the note, which we all remember, he goes, 'I had a boom shadow in Fart Face.'"

Brolin, Hader, and Forte had a tough act to follow. "The Weekend Update was Sarah Palin rapping with Amy Poehler and the audience was so hot," he said. "They were going out of their minds. And me and Brolin were dressed as these characters knowing this is gonna bomb horribly. Like the whole show up until this point has been just fireworks. And we know we're gonna blow it."

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That's when Brolin stepped in with a rallying pep talk for the ages. "I remember we went there, and we were sitting there looking at the audience before we went up, and Josh — it was like the end of The Wild Bunch, you know, like, we're gonna die," Hader recalled. "And Josh Brolin just turns to us and goes, 'Well fellas, let's shut these f—ers up.' And we went out there and it died."

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Hader views the sketch as a total flop, but said that his costar still remembers it fondly. "Will Forte, I think he's very proud of it, that's why I love Will," Hader said. "'Cause I would go, 'Ah, that didn't get a laugh?' But for Will, it was like, 'Did I like it? Did I appreciate it?'"

Listen to the full conversation between Hader and Danson above.

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