Saturday Night Live’s Kevin Nealon revealed that he only learned why he was taken off the “Weekend Update” desk when he read a new biography about his former boss.
“I’m just finishing reading that book called Lorne. It’s about Lorne Michaels. And I’m learning what happened behind the scenes that I didn’t know about,” Kevin Nealon, 72, told Obsessed: The Podcast host Matt Wilstein.
In 1994, a year and change after Entertainment Weekly crowned SNL its “Entertainer of the Year,” the magazine published an article titled “Is ‘Saturday Night’ Dead?” detailing 20 ways the show could, and should, improve.
Number one on the list? Fire Kevin Nealon from “Weekend Update.”
“The network felt the same way and were ready to meddle,” author Susan Morrison writes in her biography of the SNL creator. “Nealon was a superb sketch player, but there was a sense that, on Update, he was a mushmouth, his delivery not crisp enough.”
Nealon, who was replaced by the late Norm Macdonald as “Weekend Update” anchor after three years on the job, knew that NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer had removed him, but he learned the reason why only after reading the book.
“I knew I got taken off of there because he wasn’t happy with me, but I didn’t know until I read the book that one of the reasons was he said I was ‘mushmouth,’” Nealon said. “He couldn’t understand some of the things I was saying.”
“And for someone who, you know, is a partier like him, I think he knows what ‘mushmouth’ is about,” Nealon added, hinting at Ohlmeyer’s 1996 stint in a rehab facility. Ohlmeyer died of cancer at 72 in 2017.
Nealon, who portrayed iconic characters like Hans and Franz (with Dana Carvey) and Mr. Subliminal on “Weekend Update,” says he holds no bitterness over the decision.
Unlike Nealon’s predecessor, Dennis Miller, the SNL alum was also a heavily used cast member and writer, for which he earned an Emmy nomination.
“That was fine too, because it was a lot of work for me,” Nealon said. “I was doing ‘Weekend Update,’ and I was writing sketches and characters, and being in sketches.”
Nealon said that he could only begin writing jokes for “Update” starting Friday night, because he “couldn’t do the material or the areas that the late-night talk show hosts did during the week.”
“So, Saturday morning, I was up, and I had all the newspapers on the table,” Nealon said. “So I was doing that and trying to wrangle that altogether and then oversee a sketch I wrote, and it was a lot of work, but I enjoyed doing it for the three years.”
During SNL‘s 50th anniversary special last year, Bill Murray ranked Nealon as the ninth-best Weekend Update anchor in the show’s history, behind predecessor Dennis Miller.
“You know what? I was not a big fan of myself on the ‘Weekend Update,’” Nealon joked. But once Murray got to the end and revealed his own brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, who briefly anchors the news segment for one season in the early ’80s, as number one, Nealon realized the list “was not really for real.”
Nealon stayed just one year after he was ousted from behind the “Update” desk, departing after nine years on the show. He took up guest roles on popular sitcoms, like The Larry Sanders Show, starred in films, like fellow cast member Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, and continued his stand-up comedy.
His new special, Loose in the Crotch, is available to watch on YouTube. The Apple TV film, Come and See Me in a Good Light, which Nealon and his wife executive-produced, received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary.
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