The ‘Saturday Night Live’ cast member who tried to quit after one episode: “Can I go home?”
Not everyone is cut out to be a cast member on Saturday Night Live, with countless one-season wonders existing at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from the immovable object that is Kenan Thompson, who’s evolved into some form of eternal totem that’s become embedded in the Studio 8H furniture.
Some of the stars who didn’t hang around for a second run of episodes have done pretty well for themselves in the long run, though. On the other hand, for every Robert Downey Jr, Martin Short, or Joan Cusack, there’s an Aristotle Athari, Yvonne Hudson, or John Milhiser.
The pressures of devising, writing, and performing sketches on a limited timeframe every week are a burden that many alumni have proven they can’t carry, but there can’t be many SNL veterans who realised after their very first episode that it wasn’t for them. There’s at least one, and they reached that conclusion so quickly that they were instantly on the phone with their lawyer.
It wasn’t just anyone, either, but a Primetime Emmy-winning comedian. Not just any Primetime Emmy-winning comedian, either, but This Is Spinal Tap co-writer and star, Christopher Guest. After the film’s success and the fictional band’s outing as a musical guest in early 1984, Dick Ebersol offered all three members of the group a spot on the SNL roster.
Michael McKean was the only one who declined, with Guest and Harry Shearer hopping aboard for the tenth season, which began airing in October 1984, just seven months after Rob Reiner’s seminal mockumentary had been released in cinemas, and it was a decision that he quickly came to regret.
“I was with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Harry Shearer, and we said, ‘We’ll sign one-year contracts,'” Guest explained to Marc Maron. “And they said, ‘You can do whatever you want’. I said, ‘I want to direct all the movies. I’ll be on the show. I’ll write the show’. We did it for one year, and then we left.”
His debut came on Saturday, October 6th, 1984, and by October 8th, he was seeking legal counsel. “I’d called my lawyer on the Monday and said, ‘Can I go home?'” he revealed. “He said, ‘Probably a little late at this point. It’s gonna be hard for you to get out of this.'” When Maron asked if he’d enjoyed his brief SNL tenure, Guest answered with a blunt, “No.”
Following his departure from the show, Guest has avoided Saturday Night Live like the plague. He’s never hosted, he hasn’t made any cameos, and he’s moved forward in his career while barely acknowledging that, for a brief time, he was part of the roster on an American TV institution.
Not that it’s stopped him from building an impressive career, with the actor, writer, and filmmaker establishing himself as one of the mockumentary’s most instrumental figures, helming movies like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration, with SNL barely a distant memory anymore.
