The Year That Blew Open ‘SNL’s’ Biggest Secrets

Saturday Night Live is currently celebrating 50 years on the air. Despite all odds, the weekly sketch show continues to dominate American culture, and offer up genuinely juicy revelations about the wild machinations behind the scenes.

Ahead of the huge anniversary special coming in February 2025, here are seven secrets that were revealed about SNL in 2024.

The host who made cast members cry

Bowen Yang set off an internet firestorm back in May when he casually referenced an unnamed SNL host who “made multiple cast members cry” because he hated their sketch ideas so much. Speculation ran rampant but it wasn’t until November that his cast mate Chloe Fineman revealed the culprit: Elon Musk.

“You know what? I’m gonna come out and say at long last that I’m the cast member that he made cry,” Fineman said in a since-deleted TikTok after Musk criticized Dana Carvey’s impression of him. (Even Carvey later admitted it wasn’t great.)

“Frankly, it was only on the Thursday before the Saturday that ANY of the sketches generated laughs. I was worried,” Musk posted in response. “I was like damn my SNL appearance is going to be so f---ing unfunny that it will make a crackhead sober!! But then it worked out in the end.”

That assertion is debatable at best. And we also learned this year that if it had been up to Musk, he would have attempted to expose himself on camera to “test” whether the show was actually live.

The hit sketch that Lorne Michaels wanted to cut

If there’s one (non-political) sketch that broke through in a big way over the past couple of years, it has to be Nate Bargatze’s “Washington’s Dream” (currently sitting at 17 million views on YouTube). But as the comedian recently revealed in an interview with sketch’s co-writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell, SNL’s overlord Lorne Michaels was skeptical.

When it came time to pick the lineup for Bargatze’s first hosting gig in 2023, Michaels had left the sketch off the rundown. “I just remember Lorne… he looked back at me, and I was like, ‘I like that Washington sketch,’ and he said, ‘Alright,’ and he put it last," Bargatze recalled.

The sketch played so well at the dress rehearsal that they decided to move it up to be the second live sketch after the monologue. It was ultimately so popular that the group produced a sequel when Bargatze returned to host a second time less than a year later this past October.

The comedian who turned down playing Trump

One big question heading into the fall election season was whether the show would do anything to mix up its Donald Trump impression. Alec Baldwin was seemingly out for good, replaced by cast member James Austin Johnson. Michaels hinted at some sort of “reinvention,” which turned out to just be a fat suit, but very nearly went in a totally different direction.

After the season had already started, comedian Shane Gillis—who was infamously fired from the show before he started in 2019 only to come back and host five years later—revealed that Michaels had apparently offered him a season-long guest-starring arc as Trump. But, remarkably, Gillis says he turned it down.

The Biden impression that was planned months in advance

Dana Carvey didn’t debut his spot-on Joe Biden impression until the first episode of Season 50, long after the president had stepped aside to make room for Kamala Harris. But as Carvey let slip on his Fly on the Wall podcast, Lorne Michaels called on him to play the president before the disastrous debate that killed his campaign.

“Lorne Michaels, our superstar boss, asked me in early June, ‘Would you consider coming out and doing Biden, you know, six shows, and then you can tell us to f--- off?’” Carvey recalled, using his equally impressive Michaels impression.

He thought maybe the offer would evaporate after Biden dropped out of the race, but Michaels was insistent. “Lorne was like a dog with a bone,” Carvey added. “He’s still like, ‘You’ll come out. Maybe you’ll appear as a ghost or something.’ He just wanted me to come out anyway. So then I came out.”

The comedian who lied his way into playing Tim Walz

Michaels’ first choice to play Harris’ running mate Tim Walz was his old friend Steve Martin. But after Martin, “politely and promptly” turned him down, the search was on. It was then that comedian Jim Gaffigan’s team apparently lied on his behalf to land him the gig.

“I get a call from my manager and he’s like, ‘Hey, so we’ve been telling the booker at SNL that you’ve been sending us videos where you’re pretending to be Tim Walz’ and I’m like, ‘Oh that’s an interesting approach…” Gaffigan told Conan O’Brien. “And they’re like, ‘Yeah, and now they want to see them.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean, they want to see them?’”

The videos didn’t exist, so then Gaffigan had to put himself on tape. Since he didn’t have a Walz impression in his back pocket, he decided to just imitate his brother Mitch. The rest is history.

Cast member salaries are way smaller than you think

When New York Magazine gathered together 60 current and former SNL stars for its big anniversary cover and asked them to share their own secrets about their experience at the show, it was of course Pete Davidson who managed to make news.

Asked what he purchased with his first SNL paycheck, Davidson replied, “I think I bought dinner. You guys know what they pay us? It’s like three grand an episode.”

SNL obsessives have long known that SNL newbies don’t make much, but Davidson was among the first to put a number on it. Cast members can eventually get paid a lot more, especially if they renegotiate their contracts to stay beyond the typical seven years. But that $3,000 number is still striking when you compare it to the $1 million per episode—and more—salaries that were being thrown around at NBC in the 1990s on shows like Seinfeld and Friends.

Lorne isn’t going anywhere—but has thoughts on who could replace him

Of course, the biggest question surrounding Saturday Night Live is when—if ever—Lorne Michaels, who turned 80 this year, will step down as boss. For a while, there were rumors that the 50th season would be his last, but he and those around him have put that idea to bed.

Among the names floated as possible replacements have included Seth Meyers, who has humbly said he has no interest, and Tina Fey, who is the only person Michaels himself has acknowledged as a viable option.

“It could easily be Tina Fey,” Michaels said just about one year ago, suggesting that 2025 could be the right time to retire. But since then, he’s changed his tune.

“Every year there are more and more people that I rely on for other things, but, in the end, you really need someone to say, ‘This is what we’re doing,’” Michaels said ahead of the 50th season. “So, I don’t really have an answer; I just know that this is kind of what I do and as long as I can keep doing it, I’ll keep doing it.”

For more, listen to SNL alum Seth Meyers talk about his time on the show (and a lot more) on The Last Laugh podcast.