Not everyone watching Saturday Night Live loves it when cast members can’t hold break their laughs during a sketch. And one of them is “Weekend Update” icon Kevin Nealon.
Former “Weekend Update” anchor Kevin Nealon, 72, explained why breaking character is not something to aspire to—shortly after Ryan Gosling, belovedly notorious for breaking character, hosted the show for the fourth time this month and repeatedly laughed out loud during sketches.
“I never broke character on SNL,” Nealon wrote on X Tuesday.
At the time of his departure from the show in 1995, Nealon was the longest-tenured SNL cast member, with nine seasons under his belt. His work on the show also earned him an Emmy nod.
“I knew how much time the writers put into those scripts. You don’t want to be the one who throws it off,” he continued in his post. “Lorne doesn’t like when the cast breaks. Even if the audience laughs, it doesn’t work for the sketch.”
Nealon then offered the iconic 1990s “Chippendales Audition” sketch as a prime example of a time he held his composure while Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley hilariously danced on stage as Nealon, Mike Meyers, and Victoria Jackson played stone-faced Chippendale judges.
“If I could get through the Chippendales sketch, I could get through anything,” Nealon concluded.
It’s long been alleged that Michaels hates it when the cast breaks on air. As a host, however, Gosling’s breaking has been embraced, with SNL writers calling his giggles “adorable.”
The actor flubbed several lines during his first-ever SNL sketch, “Close Encounter,” seemingly unable to contain himself during the sketch’s antics. He’s made a habit of it ever since, joking with Jimmy Fallon in April 2024, “I feel like I laugh too much. They take it very seriously, this comedy thing.”
Fallon, a frequent offender as a cast member, was allegedly scolded by Tracy Morgan for it. In 2007, Morgan recalled telling Fallon, “That’s taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I’m the cute one.’ I told him not to do that s--t in my sketches, so he never did.”
Gosling earned Season 51 cast members a scolding from Nealon when he hosted the show on March 7, laughing frequently throughout the show, especially during the “Passing Notes” sketch, in which his and breakout star Ashley Padilla’s prop notes were changed at the last minute as a prank to encourage laughter.
The prank was effective: Padilla and Gosling laughed most of the way through, and Mikey Day also cracked a few times. Nealon argued that the cast members should have held it together.
The unimpressed alum told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed: The Podcast in January that he only learned why he was removed as “Weekend Update” host in 1994, 30 years after the fact, while reading show boss Lorne Michaels’ biography, Lorne by Susan Morrison.
“I’m learning what happened behind the scenes that I didn’t know about,” he said of being replaced by Norm Macdonald after helming the news segment for three years.
“Nealon was a superb sketch player, but there was a sense that, on Update, he was a mushmouth, his delivery not crisp enough,” Morrison wrote.
Nealon said he knew then NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer wanted him off the segment “because he wasn’t happy with me,” but he “didn’t know until I read the book that one of the reasons was he said I was ‘mushmouth.’”
“That was fine, too,” Nealon added, as he was a frequently used writer and player in addition to his “Weekend Update” duties, “because it was a lot of work for me.”
