It might be the odd movie star who would boast about zero nervousness throughout their first time internet hosting Saturday Evening Reside. However just one host can maintain the title of “most nervous visitor within the historical past of SNL.” On this week’s Fly on the Wall podcast with Dana Carvey and David Spade, 1986 host Griffin Dunne staked his declare.
The star of American Werewolf in London and After Hours was on a sizzling streak within the mid-Eighties however skittish about internet hosting SNL nonetheless. “I’d discuss to Lorne (Michaels) about my monologue,” he stated. “I used to be type of nervous about it. And he goes (insert compulsory Lorne Michaels impression right here), ‘Properly, you understand, all of the visitors, all they do is discuss their opening monologue. Properly, that’s not an important a part of the present. It’s simply an intro. We don’t care. Take the strain off.”
“He was burnt out 50 years in the past,” laughed Carvey.
However Dunne’s confession to Michaels did bear fruit, with the writers turning Dunne’s jitters into his “most nervous host” opening bit, pulling out handfuls of hair and showing to drown in his personal flop sweat.
“They put issues in my hair (to drag out),” Dunne remembered. “And it was a man off digital camera with a watering can” dealing with the pretend perspiration.
“At all times good to get soaking moist proper earlier than you are doing a complete night time of sketches,” Spade agreed.
However yanking out fistfuls of follicles wasn’t sufficient to maintain a whole monologue. So it was an excellent factor that Dunne talked to the present’s writers about a few of his different skills. “When you’ve got the primary time that the solid meets the host, (they ask if) you’ve got any particular actions that you just had been actually good at, do you do accents and all that. And I stated, ‘Properly, I understand how to play Wipeout one-handed. I simply threw that out.”
However a formidable one-handed drum solo wasn’t why Dunne was a part of SNL historical past that night time. That might are available a later sketch when pissed off solid member Damon Wayans went rogue, turning a bit half right into a flamboyantly effeminate character that fully stole the sketch’s focus.
“We had been doing like a Scarface type of a factor. I used to be doing a Pacino factor, and we did the costume (rehearsal) and he’s the cop interrogating me,” Dunne remembered. Wayans performed it straight for the follow run, however when it got here to the reside present? “There was a complete lisp concerned. And I am going, ‘I assume I didn’t get the rewrite on that.’”
Michaels was furious. “I’d by no means seen Lorne lose his cool,” Wayans confessed in Reside From New York: The Full, Uncensored Historical past of Saturday Evening Reside. “However he got here backstage, and he was like, ‘Get the fuck out of right here, who the fuck, what the fuck.’”
It was a historic firing that overshadowed Dunne’s efficiency as SNL’s most nervous host ever.
