Jane Curtin Thought Original ‘Saturday Night Live’ Viewers ‘Must Be Really Stupid’

Original Saturday Night Live cast member Jane Curtin recently admitted that, during her time on the show, she always thought SNL fans were morons — after all, who else would pay to see the Coneheads movie?

On October 11th, director Jason Reitman and Sony Pictures will unleash their “based on a true story” dramatization of the lead-up to the first-ever episode of SNL, exactly 49 years after the events in question. However, as is the case, the whenever Hollywood turns real people and events into digestible entertainment, Saturday Night will not be without a few brazen, creative liberties when it comes to the SNL mythos. In fact, the Muppets fandom is already calling on a boycott for how the film reportedly presents Jim Henson, played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun, as a hapless rube whom the entire SNL cast and crew bully and berate behind the scenes.

But the most interesting possible alteration to the SNL origin story that we may see in Saturday Night will be how the film and actress Kim Matula handle Curtin’s dismissive attitude toward her big break and its audience in real life. During an interview the New York Times, Curtin admitted that she thought that the original SNL viewers must have been dumb as rocks if they were willing to waste their Saturday nights watching the sketch show. 

But, in the nearly half-century since the premiere, the SNL fan community has proven her — wrong?

When asked about the weeks leading up to the premiere of what was then called Saturday Night on October 11, 1975, Curtin said that 30 Rockefeller Plaza didn’t exactly feel like home from the jump. “I was quiet, and nobody paid any attention to me,” she said of the planning process. “I didn’t know how to pitch. I had never had to do that in my life. … I figured, well, they hired me, they’re paying me. So it would be foolish of them not to use me.” 

Curtin did end up appearing in several sketches in the opening episode, but she still didn’t walk away from it with any warm-and-fuzzy feelings, a running theme during her time on SNL. “I never really paid much attention to the audience,” Curtin told the New York Times of the fandom that SNL slowly attracted during her five seasons on the show. “I thought, ‘Well, anybody that’s watching this must be really stupid.’ It gave me a lot of angst.”

Curtin admitted that she had to develop coping mechanisms to be able to stand such a slow-witted fandom, saying, “The way I dealt with it was, I was in this bubble, and we had a job to do within the bubble.”

However, Curtin admits, there were moments outside of “the bubble” that made her appreciative of her admittedly dull fans. “You’d pass by people, and they would shake,” Curtin recalled. “They had a physical reaction to you, because they could feel the energy behind what was happening at 30 Rock. And it was very, very exciting.”

After seeing what Curtin thought about the show’s fandom, some of today’s more sensitive SNL stans will surely shake with rage. That is, assuming any of them know how to read.