Jared from Subway’s ‘SNL’ Cameos Age About as Well as a Six-Week-Old Five-Dollar Footlong

When Olympic medal madman Michael Phelps hosted Saturday Night Live in 2008, the show’s writers had two cameos in mind for his monologue — Chuck Norris and Barack Obama. “Lorne (Michaels) felt very confident we could get both of them,” Seth Meyers said this week on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast. “Long story short, we got neither of them.”

Norris was replaced by the game William Shatner, but as Meyers pointed out, you can’t replace Barack Obama. That didn’t stop the show from wrangling another celebrity cameo for a commercial parody, the not-yet-disgraced Subway spokesman Jared Fogle. “It didn’t age well,” admitted Meyers. Jorma Taccone joked that Fogel was really good at improv, but Akiva Schaffer didn’t find it funny. “Let’s not talk about it,” he pleaded. “Let’s just move off of that.”

If only SNL could have not talked about Jared either. But here’s a reminder that before Fogel went to jail for his heinous crimes, he was famous enough to do multiple cameos on Saturday Night Live. In the Phelps show, he pops up in this commercial spoof poking fun at the amount of food the Olympian needed to consume for peak performance. 

“Hey, I’m Jared Fogle from Subway,” he says directly into the camera, inspiring raucous applause from the naive audience. “I know a little something about weight loss, and I can honestly say this diet sucks a footlong.” 

Like Meyers says, the bit doesn’t age well.

But that wasn’t Fogle’s first appearance on SNL. A few years earlier, he voiced an animated version of himself in the TV Funhouse parody Bambi 2002. This skateboarding badass Bambi is down in the dumps, and Cartoon Jared showed up for a pep talk: “Bambi, if I can lose weight, you can get those terrorists.”  

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Unbelievably, SNL revisited Jared from Subway again in 2021. This sketch featured host John Krasinski and Beck Bennett as advertising idea guys who don’t realize their time has come and gone. How out of touch are they about their abilities? “We found Jared,” brags Krasinski. “That’s right, we’re the Jared guys,” confirms Bennett. 

When the two ad hotshots propose bringing Jared back for a series of new commercials, Kenan Thompson hits the brakes hard.

“Stop trying to bring back Jared,” he insists. “We told you that can never happen. He’s a bad man!”

Hey SNL, please listen to Thompson and Schaffer. We don’t need to say the guy’s name again.