Kevin Nealon Paid Writers Out of His Own Pocket for ‘SNL’ Weekend Update Jokes

One secret benefit to anchoring Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live? Even though fans might not think of you as the star of the show, you’re probably going to log more screen time than any other cast member. Right, Colin Jost?

Gary Dell’Abate gets it. “The thing that you always had when you were on the show that everyone didn’t have — you knew you were going to be on every week because of Weekend Update,” the Howard Stern producer told Kevin Nealon this week. “And everybody didn’t know they were going to be on every week.”

Didn’t that make Nealon’s cast mates jealous? The atmosphere on Saturday Night Live can be cutthroat, Nealon admitted, but the competition is often hidden. “Nobody's coming right out where it’s obvious that they’re competitive and they’re doing things to try to undermine you.”

That said, rivalry is baked into the show’s process. ”You work really hard on your sketch and then you go to the table read and there's a big stack of sketches,” he explained to Dell’Abate. “Do you laugh at somebody else’s sketch? Because it might sway the decision?”

That competition extended to getting the job as Weekend Update anchor. “Weekend Update is not how I started, you know,” Nealon said. “Five years, I was a cast member and a writer. Weekend Update came after Dennis Miller left, and a lot of people wanted that spot. I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes. Even some of the writers really wanted to get up there.” 

While delivering fake news was a coveted SNL job, writing for the segment was not, Nealon said. “Nobody really wanted to write for Weekend Update because it wasn’t a glorifying writer’s job. Nobody’s going to say, ‘Hey, did you hear that joke about whoever?’” The real juice was in writing sketches for Adam Sandler or Chris Farley.

Unlike Jost and Michael Che, Nealon was doing heavy lifting as a sketch performer as well. “I had to write different sketches for myself, and then try to come up with Weekend Update jokes too,” Nealon said earlier this year on the Talk Is Jericho podcast. “And the difficult part was you couldn’t even start thinking about Weekend Update jokes until Saturday morning because all the talk show hosts covered all that stuff during the week.” 

It’s no wonder that Nealon had to yell for help. “I had to pay writers from Los Angeles, comedy writers, to fax me jokes,” he told Dell’Abate, aka Baba Booey. “I gave them 50 bucks out of my own pockets — each.”

Lorne Michaels could see this was a problem, but he didn’t solve it by hiring more writers or dedicating current staff to the job. Instead, he offered muffins. “Lorne decided that he would have a catered breakfast up on the 17th floor of 30 Rock, the writers’ area,” Nealon said. The plan was that free food “would entice writers to come up. They put newspapers on the table, AP photos, because there was no Google back then. This was in the 1900s.”

The breakfast idea sounded promising to Nealon, but the reality wasn’t very helpful. “I go up there and the only people that show up are Al Franken, and some of the new writers who weren't that good,” he said. “Norm Macdonald would come up just to have breakfast and read the paper.”

And so, Nealon had to break out his checkbook instead.