Caleb Hearon Says Not Getting Cast on ‘SNL’ After Two Auditions Was ‘The Two Best Things That Ever Happened to Me’

Online comedy superstar Caleb Hearon is glad that he never made it onto Saturday Night Live, and it’s easy to see why — nobody from broadcast television has ever won a fandom war against MrBeast.

Back during the early decades of Saturday Night Live, the show’s greatest strength was always how every single one of the funniest people in North America all desperately wanted to be in the cast. There was once no greater goal to an up-and-coming improviser or stand-up comedian than to take the stage at Studio 8H, because, for so many years, the artists who became stars on SNL would go on to immediately launch massively successful movie careers or start long-running, critically beloved TV shows of their own. Today, however, the comedy industry has a completely different set of incentives, and logging a few seasons at SNL is less of an indicator for future success than your engagement rate on Instagram. 

Hearon’s fans demonstrated the power of a devoted online following when they tore YouTube superstar MrBeast apart late last month for questioning Hearon’s placement ahead of him on Rolling Stone’s list of the 25 most influential content creators in 2025. Hearon, whose she/they shooters consider him to be the funniest person on the planet, is at the top of the food chain in his own burgeoning online comedy ecosystem, and, in his recent appearance on the Mythical Kitchen show “Last Meal,” he admitted that, if either of his two attempts at joining SNL succeeded, he would never have gotten to the place where his fans could force MrBeast to sue for peace.

After host Josh Scherer asked Hearon to remember the strongest bit from his Saturday Night Live audition, and before Hearon jumped into his character of a Southern mother warning her daughter's slumber party not to go near her haunted mirror, Hearon admitted, “You know what? The two best things that ever happened to me are that I didn’t get that job twice.”

“The first time I really wanted it,” Hearon recalled of his earliest SNL bid. “Because the first time I auditioned for SNL was 2019, and I didn't have any followers or team or any career to speak of, and I was like, ‘I want to make comedy and people actually see it,’ you know?” 

According to Hearon, a SNL scout saw him perform the aforementioned character bit live in Chicago, and the show flew him to New York where he tried it again for Lorne Michaels and his team. “I was very, very proud of it, and I loved that bit, and I didn’t get it,” Hearon said of his crushing (at the time) SNL audition, although, six years later, he couldn’t be more grateful to be rejected by 30 Rock. “It was a blessing,” Hearon said with a laugh. “Shout-out to all my friends who work there, but I know it was a blessing for me.”

As Hearon explained in a 2020 interview with Funny or Die, his failure to get on SNL motivated him to take his digital footprint more seriously. “It came up during that process that I should be doing online content,” Hearon said of the most important lesson he learned from his SNL audition. “I maybe had 4,000 followers or something (on Twitter) and I tweeted about politics and stuff, but I was putting zero comedy videos out. … I didn’t get that job. Then it was like, okay, I’ll put comedy videos online. I’ve got stuff to make.”

Rather than preparing for his next shot at SNL, Hearon organically grew his following online, posting his character bits directly to Twitter instead of submitting them for Michaels’ approval. As Hearon’s follower count multiplied, so did his TV and movie opportunities, culminating in an HBO stand-up special to be released this fall and a prominent role in the upcoming Netflix feature comedy Little Brother, co-starring his new friend John Cena.

Meanwhile, even the biggest SNL stars who somehow survive Michaels’ annual cast purge count themselves lucky if they so much as book a part in a national commercial campaign. In 2025, having a passionate following on social media is clearly far more important to a young comic’s career than spending 20 weeks a year pulling all-nighters just to try to make Elon Musk look funny and likable.