The Tasteless, Rejected ‘SNL’ Sketch John Mulaney Insisted on Doing When He Returned to Host

Popular comedian and equine therapy slanderer John Mulaney is currently starring in the Broadway show All In, penned by his friend, former Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich. To promote the play, which is made up of short stories all about romance, Mulaney and Rich have been giving several interviews. And a not insignificant number of them have been about scrapped SNL material.

The pair told The New York Times that when they first met at SNL, they wrote a sketch together called “Cash for Silver,” a parody of cash-for-gold commercials that made it to dress rehearsal, but was ultimately cut from the show.

Mulaney and Rich went into more detail about the sketch during their appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, describing how it began as a traditional ad with Bill Hader asking viewers to send in their silver. But Hader’s character becomes increasingly desperate until it’s revealed that “he and his family are marooned on Werewolf Island” and need to make silver bullets before the next full moon. “It had everything,” Mulaney argued.

Meyers pointed out that there was also a role played by Kenan Thompson. “There’s a boatman who made peace with the werewolves,” Mulaney recalled. “They let him come and go and they don’t kill him,” thus preserving the airtight logic of the “Cash for Silver” fictional universe.

While SNL could have only benefited from a sketch featuring the phrase “Werewolf Island,” another of Mulaney and Rich’s sketches didn’t make it to the show for slightly more understandable reasons. Meyers pointed out that “Switcheroo” was a sketch idea that “no host was ever interested in doing.” 

“Nor, I should say, did the read-through table like,” Mulaney added, explaining that “Switcheroo” was about an old sitcom called Switcheroo, focusing on a father and his young son who swap bodies, not unlike the Kirk Cameron/Dudley Moore vehicle Like Father, Like Son or Vice Versa starring Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage. 

But the theme song lyrics reveal a slight twist: “Son goes to work, dad goes to work and the son has sex with the mom. What’re gonna do, it’s a switcheroo?” Yeah…

“It’s a really detailed examination of the sexual dynamics of a full parent-child switcheroo,” Mulaney noted. 

“The original draft was about 30 pages long,” Rich joked.

While the sketch was, unsurprisingly, rejected during Mulaney’s time as an SNL writer, when he was invited back to host, things changed. According to Rich, when Mulaney called to tell him the news that he’d be hosting, before Mulaney had even finished his sentence, the writer proclaimed: “We’re resubmitting ‘Switcheroo.’”

Yes, the only way that John Mulaney could convince a host to appear in “Switcheroo” was if the host was John Mulaney. “I wanna be clear,” Mulaney stressed to Meyers’ audience, “it wasn’t like this ‘More Cowbell’ thing, where everyone loved it and everyone wanted it on the show — people didn’t like ‘Switcheroo’ at all.”

Sure enough, when Mulaney hosted for the first time in 2018, “Switcheroo” (or rather, “Sitcom Reboot”) finally made it onto the air. 

And the world was never the same again.