5 ‘Saturday Night Live’ Characters Named After Real People

1 Matt Foley

The real Matt Foley is a priest and long-time friend of Chris Farley. He had no idea he was about to become an iconic comedy character when he showed up for a Second City show in the early 1990s. “I was in the audience that night,” Foley remembered in The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts. “When he said, ‘My name is Matt Foley, and I am a motivational speaker!’ I was probably as red as a beet. I smiled and slid down a little further in my chair.” 

After the show, Foley met up with Farley at a bar. “Chris told me that he was never going to change the name, that it was always going to be Matt Foley. I’m honored by it still.”

2 Jodi from Bronx Beat

Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and writer Emily Spivey used to riff on characters in their office, occasionally “doing our girlfriend Jodi, who still runs the hair department at SNL,” Rudolph said on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. “It was the loosest we ever were, and it came out of years of being on that show, years of being friends, years of loving each other and finishing each other’s sentences.” 

The goofs became a sketch, and SNL hair stylist Jodi Mancuso didn’t mind the mocking homage. “I just remember laughing about it because the Irish in me didn’t care because we’re very sarcastic,” she told the Television Academy Foundation. Once the sketch was written, Mancuso would help Poehler perfect her Bronx accent. 

3 The Olympia

Don (Fr. Guido Sarducci) Novello was the writer behind the “Cheeseburger Cheeseburger” sketches in SNL’s early seasons. He based the diner with the extremely limited menu on Chicago’s Billy Goat Tarvern, a local dive in which many of the town’s newspaper writers would gather to drink. 

At John Belushi’s request, the restaurant was dubbed the Olympia, the name of his father’s restaurant in the 1960s. That didn’t stop the Billy Goat Tavern from posting a “John Belushi, Saturday Night Live” sign. Noted a-hole Jim Belushi wasn’t having it. “I went to John: ‘Hey, man, this son of a bitch is marketing his restaurant as ‘Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger!’ Let’s go rough him up,” he told Chicago Magazine. “John looked at me and said, ‘He wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t need it.’ I’m still trying to live by that.”

4 Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey

Roseanne Roseannadanna was one of Gilda Radner’s first breakout characters, appearing on Weekend Update to answer letters from Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey. Once he wrote in to ask for advice after he quit smoking. “Now I’m depressed,” he said. “I gained weight, my face broke out, I’m nauseous, I’m constipated, my feet swelled, my gums are bleeding, my sinuses are clogged, I got heartburn, I’m cranky and I have gas. What should I do?” 

Roseannadanna’s response: “Mr. Feder, you sound like a real attractive guy. You belong in New Jersey.”

That’s where the real Richard Feder lived. He was the brother-in-law of Radner’s SNL writing partner Alan Zweibel, who decided to use his relative’s name as a joke. The recurring bit made Feder a temporary celebrity. “I went down to get diapers and milk like every other father, and I spent 40 minutes talking to people,” Feder told the Seattle Times. “My wife thought I was having an affair.”

5 Linda Richman

Can we talk? Not only did Mike Myers base his “Coffee Talk” character on his mother-in-law, Linda Richman, but he used her actual name as well. No big whoop.

Richman eventually parlayed her new-found fame into a book deal but wanted to distance herself from SNL notoriety. ''We all know about the Coffee Talk character,'' she told the New York Times upon its publication “It became so big, but it’s over. I don’t want this to be Mike Myers’ mother-in-law's book. It gets Jackie Stallone-ish. You feel like a freak after a while.”