Chloe Fineman Says She Was the ‘Pervert’ Behind Sydney Sweeney’s Hooters Sketch on ‘SNL’
Monday pitch sessions at Saturday Night Live aren’t always the fast-paced, comedy-rich idea factories you might imagine. After partying into the wee hours of a Sunday morning, cast members don’t always have a bag full of fresh sketch ideas to share. That’s how you get comics offering desperate bullshit while searching for an actual idea.
“I realized a couple months in there was the art of the fake pitch,” Jay Mohr once said. “Kevin Nealon and Norm Macdonald, it was like a contest every week to see who could come up with the fuckin’ weirdest fake pitch that the host believed was actually happening.”
The only problem?
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“Sometimes they do become sketches,” Chloe Fineman admitted on this week’s Fly on the Wall podcast.
“Yeah, the host doesn’t know,” replied host David Spade. “They bite on a fake pitch. And you go, ‘Uh-oh.’”
It’s happened to Fineman, who owned up to sometimes pulling last-minute ideas out of thin air. For example: “Sydney Sweeney. I pitched her the Hooters idea where I was like, ‘Maybe work at Hooters? And we’re counting tips, I get $20 and you’re like, ‘Cool, I made $40,000.’”
The next thing Fineman knew, Sweeney was DMing her to get started on a script.
“We got in so much trouble for sexualizing Sydney Sweeney,” Fineman laughed, with “trouble” apparently defined as 5.5 million views on YouTube and counting. But don’t blame Lorne Michaels, she said. “Hey, it was your pervert over here.”
No matter who the pervert was, the Fly on the Wall hosts were into it. “It was so fucking funny,” said Spade.
“Some of that silliness is just the way the world is,” added Dana Carvey. “That’s why (Ryan Gosling’s sketch) Beavis and Butt-Head hit so hard. That Hooters sketch. I think we’re just in the mood for madness.”
Fineman agreed: “The political climate, you can kind of touch it, but not really. So it’s opened the door for weird. Which I think is so nice.”
The SNL comic says her perverted weirdness isn’t confined to the Hooters sketch either. She recently did a series of live shows with castmate Sarah Sherman. “Sarah’s extremely disgusting and nauseating, and there was like a 30-minute slideshow of a vagina prosthetic,” Fineman revealed. “And then I come out and I do my impressions, but I make them orgasm. So I guess it’s like rated X.”
“An after-dark show,” offered Carvey.
That’s it, replied Fineman. “Two nice little Jewish perverts coming out.”