John C. Reilly Learned This Important Comedy Lesson From Will Ferrell Trolling P. Diddy on ‘SNL’

Great comedy requires great courage, and there is no braver bit in Hollywood than turning the tables on Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and violating his boundaries for a change.

In early May 1998, Saturday Night Live invited Combs to be that week’s musical guest alongside Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, leading to one of the more bizarre musical mash-ups in SNL history. The Puff Daddy/Page combination proved to be a discordant duo, but with the musicians providing a track to the upcoming bid-budget Godzilla movie, a performance in Studio 8H seemed like a smart move from a marketing standpoint. Predictably, there were some personnel problems during that week leading up to the ill-fated SNL performance, but the drama wasn’t between Combs and Page — no, it was between Will Ferrell and the self-important, presumptuous and ridiculous rules that Combs set for the SNL stage.

During a recent appearance on the Steve-O’s Wild Ride! podcast, Ferrell’s perennial co-star John C. Reilly reflected on how Ferrell’s disruption of Combs’ rehearsal session is an inspirational story for any comedian learning to commit to the bit.

When discussing his time working with Ferrell on Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Reilly revealed, “In a way, Will taught me (that) nothing matters except getting the joke across. When we were doing Talladega, I remember literally like, okay, Will is now going to be in his underwear and he’s going to run around the race track thinking he’s on fire. I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘Are you sure man? You wanna be in your underwear?’ Because neither of us were in such great shape then.”

“And then you watch him do it, and you’re like, ‘No, of course, that’s punk rock! That's what you do!'” Reilly said of the famous Talladega Nights scene. “And Will is ride or die like that. He will chase a joke from the very beginning to the very end.” 

But as for Reilly’s favorite Ferrell story, that one happened eight years prior to the release of Talladega Nights, back when a certain music mogul thought he could push around the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live. “He told me this amazing thing one time, he started fucking around at Saturday Night Live — I forgot what the name of the character was, it was like David, or something,” Reilly recalled, referencing Ferrell’s famous background character “Ron.” 

“And he wore this sweater vest, and this weird shirt, and these slacks, and someone said, ‘I dare you to wear that every day when you come in here.’ And he started wearing it every day. For a whole season of the show,” Reilly set the scene. “And there was this one famous story when Puff Daddy was on the show. … He told SNL people, like, ‘No one is allowed on the floor when I’m rehearsing.’ And everyone in the cast, including Will, was like, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’”

Refusing to honor a mere musical guest’s diva-like demands, Ferrell, still in his Ron phase, took Combs’ rules as a challenge. “Will went out as David (Ron), and there’s a famous video tape of it, it’s the rehearsal before the dress rehearsal … and Will just starts slowly coming out in character, just standing behind (Combs) in this creepy way,” Reilly retold. “You can see he totally gets in Puff Daddy’s head.”

“That kind of commitment, to follow a bit just because someone said, ‘I dare you to wear that outfit every day,’” Reilly praised of Ferrell. “That taught me, you have to go for it. What’s more important than that?”

Well, in the grand scheme of things, staying out of prison is also pretty important — so let’s say that it’s Ferrell: 2, Combs: 0.