Christopher Guest Asked His Lawyer to Get Him Out of ‘SNL’ After Just One Episode

Working at Saturday Night Live is an experience that doesn’t exactly go up to 11 — at least not according to comedian, director and Spinal Tap guitarist Christopher Guest.

It’s easy to forget that all three members of Tap were cast members on SNL. Guest and Harry Shearer were hired for the show’s 10th season in 1984 (Shearer had already been a cast member back in Season Five) appearing in sketches such as this 60 Minutes parody exposing the health hazards of novelty products:

Michael McKean didn’t join the cast until the ‘90s, but when he hosted in ‘84, the trio debuted their Folksmen characters, meaning that A Mighty Wind is, technically, an SNL movie. 

While it’s certainly not unheard of for SNL cast members to later wish that they hadn’t joined the show, Guest may hold the record for the quickest regret. 

On the most recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Guest, who worked with future SNL stars Chevy Chase and John Belushi in the National Lampoon show Lemmings, recalled how he landed the SNL gig. “Lorne was gone for five years, and when he left, my friend Bob Tischler from New New Jersey took over as a producer,” Guest explained. “He said, ‘You should come on the show.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m doing this movie — it was Spinal Tap.’ (He said), ‘Well, come after that.’”

“I was with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Harry Shearer, and we said, ‘We’ll sign one-year contracts,’” the Waiting for Guffman star continued. “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.”

When Maron asked if he had “good times” at SNL, Guest bluntly responded, “No.” 

In fact, just two days after his first episode, Guest was already planning an exit strategy: “I’d called my lawyer on the Monday and said, ‘Can I go home?’ He said, ‘Probably a little late at this point. It’s gonna be hard for you to get out of this.’”

Guest’s reasons for wanting to bolt weren’t limited to having issues with the show. “I had just met my wife (Jamie Lee Curtis). And I said, ‘That is more interesting to me than this is,’” he admitted. “And we would fly on alternate weekends back and forth to L.A. She would come, I would go there, and we were married five months later.” 

Guest did acknowledge that he had a pretty sweet deal at SNL. “Most people would've said, ‘They're giving you a lot of money. You can do whatever you want. You can leave in a year. What's the matter with you?’” And he conceded that some sketches with Billy Crystal were “fun.”

But had his legal rep given him the green light, Guest “would have been out of there,” possibly so fast that he would have left a Christopher Guest-shaped hole in the wall.