Amy Poehler Shares Her Part in the Grand Tradition of ‘SNL’ Vandalism

Before each Saturday Night Live performance, Kristen Wiig would light a candle, she once told Kelly Clarkson. Amy Poehler shared her own pre-show ritual with Clarkson this week. “When Don Pardo would say my name,” Poehler explained, “I used to just take a moment and close my eyes for about a split second. Because that's about all the time you have at SNL. Molly Shannon used to do that — she told me about it so then I did it.”

Aww, sweet. But not as fun as another SNL tradition that Poehler revealed. It turns out the Parks and Rec star got Shannon’s office after she left the show, a fact evidenced by the scribbles Shannon left on the room’s walls. “Everyone would just kind of leave their name like summer camp,” Poehler said. “You'd write your name on the wall.”

Defacing SNL property is a long-standing tradition that goes well beyond autographing office walls like a comedy yearbook. Here are a few other times cast members left the 30 Rock facilities in less than pristine condition…

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd referred to their office as the Cave, according to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. “There were dirty clothes in piles several feet high in the corners, cartons and boxes stacked on the floor, loose pages of scripts littered everywhere, cassettes with the tape streaming out of them in long swirls, scattered collections of armament magazines, industrial manuals, liquor bottles and motorcycle parts.”

The walls were full of fist-sized holes, too, but you’d never know it — Belushi and Aykroyd covered them with Polaroids and soiled panties sent in by fans.

Jim Belushi contributed his own damage when he threw a fire extinguisher at producer Dick Ebersol, according to SNL oral history Live from New York. He missed, leaving a hole in the drywall rather than in Ebersol. 

Michael O’Donoghue did some redecorating when he was brought back to the show as head writer. “He put us all in a room,” remembered Joe Piscopo. “O’Donoghue came in, spray-painted DANGER on the wall, and said, ‘This is what the show lacks.’”

While he didn’t do damage to his actual office, writer Fred Wolf says Chris Farley “once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit.”

That habit of elimination in the office carried through to the Tina Fey days. In her memoir Bossypants, she remembers reaching for a reference book in writer Steve Higgins’ office. Higgins stopped her to move a paper cup from the shelf, gathering others from around the room to dump them. “Oh yeah, that’s pee in those cups,” Fey learned from Paula Pell. 

When a grossed-out Fey told another of the show’s writers, he confessed that he did it as well. “He said it was just something guys did when they were too lazy to go to the bathroom,” she wrote. “The bathroom, I should point out, was about as far away as you are from this book. I started to feel like I was from space.”

So there’s nothing new going on here, Amy Poehler. Defacing the office is an SNL tradition that’s been celebrated for 50 years.