“SNL'”s Ana Gasteyer Says a Fan Once Yelled 'Schweddy Balls!' When She Was Singing the National Anthem

Ana Gasteyer’s classic “Schweddy Balls” sketch comes back to haunt her in the most interesting places.

The actress and comedian, 57, was part of a panel of Saturday Night Live alumni who joined hosts Gary Dell’Abate and Jon Hein for a special SNL on Stern Roundtable on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM channel, Howard 101, on Thursday, Feb. 6. At one point, Gasteyer brought up one of her most memorable “Delicious Dish” sketches, which featured guest host Alec Baldwin as Pete Schweddy, a baker famous for his “Schweddy balls” desserts.

“I was singing the national anthem at a World Series baseball game and I was just about to breathe — it’s terrifying to sing the national anthem in a baseball stadium — and I took a big breath and someone went, ‘Schweddy balls!’ ” Gasteyer recalled, eliciting laugher from fellow panelists Chris Kattan, Jon Lovitz, Mikey Day, Laraine Newman, Bobby Moynihan and Kevin Nealon.

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During her six-season run on SNL from 1996 to 2002, Gasteyer’s Margaret Jo McCullen, co-host of the fictional NPR show “Delicious Dish” along with Molly Shannon’s Teri Rialto, became one of her most popular recurring characters. While Baldwin’s 1998 sketch certainly wasn’t the only “Delicious Dish” to become a sensation — a 2010 sketch featuring Betty White was also a hit — “Schweddy Balls” remains a perennial gag, so to speak, more than 25 years later according to Gasteyer.

“I didn’t plan for that to be a recurring catchphrase, you know what I mean?” she said. “You don’t sit there and go, ‘This is the thing they’ll repeat.’ It just happens as they were saying. The world picks it up.”

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Gasteyer said she knew the sketch was special during the read-through for the 1998 episode, and in fact Baldwin later returned to reprise his Pete Schweddy in 2001.

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“No one had imitated NPR pundits. No one had ever done that before and it’s such a fine line to sound like them and I think that, Ana, you did that so brilliantly,” Newman said of the Margaret Jo McCullen character.

“It was really comforting because you had headsets on,” Gasteyer explained. “It was really quiet. It was weird. Like I think they thought it was going to bomb the first time we did it because it’s so low energy and so quiet and I had done it at The Groundlings so I knew that it could work, in fact I auditioned with it, but when it was successful I remember people being kind of surprised, but it was always really relaxing because it was so quiet.”

That is, of course, until fans are shouting suggestive quotes at your during a major sporting event.

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