Andy Samberg Calls ‘SNL’s Cue Card System ‘Psychotic’
Saturday Night Live sketches don’t always go smoothly. There might be flubbed lines, missed cues or, between the years 1998 and 2004, Jimmy Fallon’s constant giggling.
One of the biggest challenges for cast members and hosts is performing scenes while reading off of cue cards. Since the sketches are written (and rewritten) at the last minute, memorizing lines isn’t always an option, so actors are often forced to try and act naturally while also reading their dialogue from a large piece of cardstock that some dude is holding offscreen like that creep in Love Actually.
On the most recent Q&A episode of The Lonely Island Podcast with Seth Meyers, former cast member/kinda current cast member Andy Samberg revealed that SNL’s cue card system is even more chaotic than you might imagine.
Jorma Taccone asked his fellow Lonely Islander Samberg about his time on the show and whether or not cue cards were actually helpful. “Does it help that you're looking at cue cards and not necessarily the actor that you’re looking at?” Taccone queried. “Or is that actually worse in terms of, like, the nervousness?”
Samberg replied that if there are a “ton of lines” then “it's better to make sure that your eye line is correct with cameras and stay on cards.” But he said that it can be difficult if the role is more “performance based” and involves a “lot of physicality.”
Samberg revealed that some of SNL’s biggest names were great at a skill known as “card jumping.” Because each sketch has as many as four sets of cards, performers can “move around the scene and jump from one set of cards to another mid-sentence.”
He noted that “some people are very, very savvy about it and build in little moves and moments for themselves to get to the other set, ‘cause they want to be more active in the scene.” He named former cast members Dana Carvey, Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell as some of the all-time best card jumpers.
It’s also not uncommon for writers to change cards, at the very last minute, forcing head cue card handler Wally Feresten to make changes “while four other people are just mirroring the changes as they happen.” This season’s political cold opens were particularly “insane” because “there were like five, six writers working on them at all times,” making edits with white tape to avoid rewriting whole cards. Quick reminder: It’s the year 2025.
Crazier still, if the show is running long, they may start cutting a sketch during the sketch, by simply removing cards. Samberg recalled a show when the floor manager “just started pulling cards out of the stack and throwing them away, and I was like ‘Huh?’ And you have to be in the scene while you're watching them do that, and not freak out and fuck up the scene 'cause you're live on television. It’s psychotic.”
Even after all that, when watching from home, now that he’s left, Samberg still sometimes criticizes the show when it’s a “mess,” forgetting all about the behind-the-scenes chaos that all but guarantees messiness.
