Mike Drucker Was ‘SNL’s King of Nintendo Wii
As Mike Drucker explains in his new book, Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games, he’s the lucky guy who somehow forged a career out of his dual loves: comedy and video games. The guy who wrote for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Bill Nye Saves the World talked to me about playing Wii Bowling with Jason Sudeikis, bonding with Fallon over Legend of Zelda and laughing at “Mike Drucker” as a sketch character when he interned at Saturday Night Live.
“I fell in love with stand-up when I started doing it. It’s such a hard, weird thing to get into comedy. And it’s almost a blessing and a curse to find out it’s the thing that you’re good at because then you’re like, ‘Now I’ve got to do this forever. I love doing this so much that I am trapped doing this forever.’”
“I was a junior in college at NYU, and there was an open mic at a comedy club that still exists called the New York Comedy Club. It cost three bucks, and I had spent about a month preparing jokes. I went on stage, I was nervous, but I didn’t do poorly. There were maybe seven people at this open mic in the middle of the day. I got such an adrenaline rush from it. It was almost like, ‘Oh, this is how people feel when they play music.’ Or how people who are great at sports must feel when they play sports. I’m coming a little more alive doing this.”
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“I lived in New York, and I got the chance to intern for NBC Casting, mostly the people who were casting the criminals and victims on Law & Order. New York casting is like, ‘All right, we need a dead body.’”
“They were like, ‘We know you do comedy, we’ll hook you up with an internship with the writers’ department at SNL.’ And so I got lucky a second time and got to intern for SNL, where I was hanging out with the writers and the cast members. They were super nice and supportive. And they even let me submit freelance jokes to Weekend Update.”
“People like Seth Meyers, Jason Sudeikis and Andy Samberg, they didn’t have to treat us as good as they did. We were just kids who were fetching coffee, but they really noticed those of us who loved comedy.”
“This was around when the Nintendo Wii was coming out. And the thing about places that are famous, whether it be famous TV shows or famous people, is they get a lot of free stuff. And so the office got a Nintendo Wii.”
“I had already been known there for being a video-game person. I wore a lot of video-game clothing, probably an embarrassing amount, but it did make me memorable. And so they were like, ‘Hey, do you want to help set this up because you understand this?’ This crowd gathers of writers and cast members and support staff just watching as people are playing Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling. It was introducing this beautiful thing to some of the most famous people on earth. It was a very weird experience, but it was super cool.”
“I kicked ass. I did very well. I should have probably been more humble, but I was still in this mindset that if I dominated, they’d respect me. Rather than being like, ‘Okay, you can move along now.’”
“Sudeikis was really good at it. I think Samberg was really good at it. Sudeikis is also an actual athlete, so he just naturally picked up Wii Sports very, very easily. He’s both a gamer and an athlete. So for him, that was the most natural game in the world.”
“The writers and the cast liked the interns who were very big into comedy. At big shows, the interns come in a few varieties. There are people who love television and want to learn the television business and become producers. Great. There are people who love comedy and just want to be comedy nerds. They loved those. And then there were kind of the interns who wanted to meet a famous person. When I was there, an intern was fired because he stole a pair of drumsticks from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
“I was this goofy, awkward intern who was very eager to please. I was kind of a cartoon character. And they were like, ‘Okay, we’ll just put that character in the show and give him his name.’ They knew — and they were correct — that it would blow my mind.” (That’s Zach Braff playing Drucker.)
“Jimmy Fallon is a big video-game fan. And because I understood video games and because I had worked for Nintendo, I often became the go-between. Anytime there was a video-game-related bit, and I wasn‘t the one pitching it, there was someone coming to me, like, ‘Hey, so how accurate is this? If we need to find an old pixelated Link from Legend of Zelda, what‘s the best place to pull that from?‘”
“I had a hand in a number of (Tonight Show) Nintendo sketches and a hand in playing games behind the scenes, which was always fun. But playing video games with your boss is kind of intimidating. It was nice to be in an environment where they loved video games so much. They weren‘t treated as just a novelty thing to throw a bone to the audience once in a while. They actually liked video games there.”
“I had done my research when I was interviewing for (The Tonight Show), and this would've been my first-step TV job. I‘d written for award shows. I‘d done comedy writing for things like The Onion or McSweeney's, but this would‘ve been my first TV job. I already knew that Jimmy Fallon played video games on his show, but I didn‘t know specifically what he was a giant fan of. I found out he was a fan of Legend of Zelda, and so I wore a Legend of Zelda track jacket that I got from Nintendo during the interview.”
“My manager was like, ‘Don‘t wear a suit in this interview. You don‘t have a good suit, and you‘re going to feel awkward in it. Just wear something that you feel comfortable in.’ And so I wore this track jacket. It was a very good icebreaker. You can find that one personal thing that you can bond over. It just makes the rest so much more relaxed and comfortable.”
