While writing on the show, the Emmy-winning comedian (alongside Bill Hader) co-created one of the most popular characters in the show’s nearly 50-year history: Stefon. Mulaney went on to write on SNL for the next five years. One night while out to dinner his Mom, Seth Meyers called him and offered him a job writing on the show instead of being a cast member. Knowing it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he went ahead with the audition, but decided that he would only do four minutes of his stand-up rather than any characters. “I didn’t do impressions and I wasn’t good at doing characters and I did stand-up in a sort of, outdated way.” You can imagine, then, his surprise when he was asked to audition. His style of comedy was, as he’s described, “irrelevant” and far from topical, nearly the exact opposite of what SNL tends to gravitate toward. His early 20s were filled with stand-up and writing for various sketch projects, and while he adored everything about SNL, he never once thought he’d ever have anything to do with it. Sure enough, Mulaney dedicated his life to comedy. “I say around age four I knew I wanted to be a nightclub entertainer because I wanted to be like Ricky Ricardo,” adding that by age five, he loved comedy so much that he couldn’t imagine spending his life any other way. From a very early age, he started collecting comedy albums and was fascinated by reruns of iconic sitcoms, such as I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Despite his parents being “stiff” lawyers, he said comedy was always present in the home. On an episode of the Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist podcast, Mulaney explained that ever since he was four, he knew he wanted to be an entertainer. While he’s best known for being a highly-successful stand-up comedian, Mulaney’s roots are at SNL. This marked Mulaney’s fifth time hosting, which naturally ushered him into the Five-Timers Club, where he joined a select group of people that includes John Goodman, Melissa McCarthy, Steve Martin, and Justin Timberlake. After quite the hiatus due to the Olympics taking over NBC, Saturday Night Live returned last night with host John Mulaney and musical guest LCD Soundsystem.
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