Saturday Night Live isn’t the easiest show to work for thanks to the stressful hours, relentless competition and the constant fear that Alec Baldwin will randomly pop by and take your only speaking role.
A lot of former cast members have talked about this problem over the years. Janeane Garofalo called her time at SNL “the most miserable experience of my life.” Bill Hader routinely suffered from panic attacks, even while on the air. Hey, at least they got… shockingly little money.
The most vocal critic of the bunch may be Harry Shearer, who said of his brief SNL career, “I was fully prepared for a difficult situation. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult. I was pretty fucking miserable for virtually the entire season.” He also called producer Lorne Michaels “an expert at manipulating people, and playing psychological games with people.”
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The latest ex-SNL employee to weigh in on the show’s intense emotional toll is Kyle Mooney. While chatting with Dana Carvey and David Spade on the most recent episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast, Mooney argued that working at SNL is “unhealthy. … we must all agree it’s not a healthy place to be.”
Mooney also recalled that SNL producer Erik Kenward once suggested that in “20, 30, 40 years, there might be some sort of study about PTSD associated with people who worked at that show, because it is such an intense onslaught,” adding that “it’s definitely not good for you. There’s no way It is.”
This may sound hyperbolic, but other SNL stars have spoken about it in very similar terms, including Dan Aykroyd who once claimed that performing on the show was “like being in combat” and hard to take “week after week.” Nora Dunn flat-out stated that “SNL is a traumatic experience” and “something you have to survive.”
Mooney did clarify that, while the show is clearly a psychological nightmare to work on, it still has its perks “in terms of what it teaches you and the fact that you have this massive platform.” Carvey then questioned whether or not it made Mooney, who just directed his second movie, Y2K, a more confident filmmaker with more emotional “armor.”
“You definitely become way less precious about your work,” Mooney explained. He also said that his most “profound” takeaway from his time on the show was learning that he didn’t have to wait for inspiration to strike to write comedy, but could force himself to come up with material each week out of necessity. “It was surprising that I found out that I could write something that I was okay with each week.”
But while there are obviously some pluses, it’s hard to say whether or not it’s ultimately worth working in an environment so stressful that future scientists may end up analyzing Jon Lovitz’s brain.