Pete Davidson and John Mulaney pulled back the “Saturday Night Live” curtain, revealing the words they shared with celebrity hosts after they bombed a monologue.
On Friday, Mulaney appeared on the former “SNL” star’s Netflix podcast, titled “The Pete Davidson Show,” where the writer and the actor talked about their shared experiences on the weekly sketch show. The two soon bonded over a routine they’d both routinely perform: telling hosts they did fine after they tanked their monologues.
“When I was 25, I would tell Oscar-winning hosts, I’d write their monologue and be like, ‘You’re gonna say all that and it’s gonna go great,’” Mulaney said. “They’d tank eight times out of 10.’”
“Yeah, but then when they get off, and they’ve tanked, and you still have to be like, ‘You crushed it,’” Davidson commiserated.
“Yeah, they’ll have actor face,” Mulaney continued. “They sort of don’t get it, because they’re just an actor, you know? And they’d be like, ‘Hey, was that good?’ And you’d be like, ‘No. Do you have ears?’”
You can watch the full clip below.
Mulaney — now a frequent host himself and member of the Five Timers Club — worked at “Saturday Night Live” as a writer from 2008 to 2013. He just barely missed overlapping with Davidson, who joined “SNL” as a cast member in 2014 for Season 40 and continued for eight years (with waning frequency) through 2022.
The duo ran through a number of excuses they would give to hosts to explain for why they may have felt that they bombed during the monologue. These included the room having poor acoustics (it doesn’t), the audience not speaking English (they do) and that the host should only play for the camera (they shouldn’t).
“It’s famously one of the best mic sound studios in the world,” Mulaney acknowledged for the acoustics excuse. “It used to home to the NBC orchestra, like it is a perfectly calibrated sounding room, but I was like, ‘Bad acoustics, homie. What can I tell you?’”
