The only ‘Saturday Night Live’ cast member who got fired twice: “I wasn’t in full-on despair”
You can’t cook the same omelette every week for 50 years without breaking a few eggs, and as crushing as it can be at the time, plenty of cast members have gone on to show that getting fired from Saturday Night Live isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Robert Downey Jr only lasted one season, which also happened to be the one that’s still regarded as the worst in the show’s history, and he did alright for himself, capping off his phoenix-like resurrection by becoming the first former SNL star to win an Academy Award for their acting exploits.
Adam Sandler became one of Hollywood’s biggest and most bankable stars within a couple of years of his dismissal, with Chris Farley, Chris Rock, Damon Wayans, Jenny Slate, and Sarah Silverman just some of the names who found success in one arena or another after being given their marching orders by Lorne Michaels.
Any long-running film series or TV show will inevitably freshen up its roster, and nobody becomes a staple of Saturday Night Live with the expectation that they’re going to be there forever. Well, Kenan Thompson seems to be the exception, with his record-breaking run having recently entered its 23rd season.
Everyone who joins the repertory will either leave of their own volition or be informed that their contract won’t be renewed at some point, but spare a thought for poor Chris Parnell, who suffered the ignominy of being the only cast member in history to be fired twice, not that he was left feeling too devastated about making such an unwanted slice of history.
After debuting in September 1998, he quickly became part of the furniture. Three years later, though, with Michaels keen to trim the herd after hiring four new cast members ahead of its 27th season in September 2001, Parnell was given the boot alongside Jerry Minor, but not for long.
As he explained to Cracked, he’d heard “some rumour that there was an NBC executive who didn’t dig my stuff” as the reason for his firing. The way SNL tended to work was that the actors would find out by July 1st if they were being retained, so Parnell was operating under the assumption that his job was safe.
“We all just assumed we were getting renewed,” he said. “So it was a pretty big blow when I found out from my manager that I wasn’t going back.” As a popular and well-liked fixture of SNL, some of the show’s heaviest hitters, including Will Ferrell, were outraged that he’d been booted, which led to Parnell being reinstated six months later, and he’d stay there for another six years until he was fired again.
“If they were going to give me another season, I wasn’t going to say no,” he admitted. “It’s a freaking job, and I liked it. Sure enough, they didn’t renew it, but it was OK. It wasn’t a blow at that time.” With his extracurricular career starting to take off, Parnell “wasn’t in full-on despair like I was the first time,” making his second time being told his services were no longer required a less bitter pill to swallow than the first.
