Michael McKean Remembers Getting Fired From ‘SNL’
Michael McKean, a comedy veteran with credits ranging from Laverne and Shirley to This Is Spinal Tap, also has a forgotten season of Saturday Night Live on his IMDb. “I was there for such a short period of time,” he told Dana Carvey and David Spade on the Fly on the Wall podcast this week. “And I was kind of breaking the job in just as I was handed the walking papers.”
In total, McKean logged 26 shows on SNL — six at the end of Season 19, then the entirety of Season 20. Lorne Michaels counts that year as one of the closest he’s ever come to being fired, a miserable season that saw the loss of Phil Hartman and the arrival of extremely unhappy cast members Chris Elliott and Janeane Garofalo.
McKean didn’t get to stick around for Michaels’ reinvention in Season 21, bringing in new stalwarts like Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri and Darrell Hammond. “They were just kind of cleaning house,” he said. “We had a lot of people. That was one of those years where like 22 people were involved. (Chris) Farley was leaving. Adam (Sandler) was leaving.”
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Part of the reason McKean got the axe might have been his lousy impression of then-President Bill Clinton. “I followed the very best impression of Clinton. It was Phil Hartman, easily the best ever. I followed his with mine, which was just sort of an overweight Barney Fife. It wasn’t a good Clinton,” he admitted. “And I was followed by Darrell, who did the second best.”
“I’m not a big impression guy,” McKean said, who got props from Carvey for his Howard Stern imitation. “I mean, I did like five people total.”
Instead, he expressed admiration for SNL stars who had sideways takes on celebrity impressions. “That’s what I love about Bill Hader’s impressions,” McKean said. “They’re always accurate enough to make you go, oh fuck, he’s nailing it. And then you realize he’s gonna go a little wide with it, his Vincent Price or his Keith Morrison.”
Those not-quite-accurate impressions have a long history on the show. “The beginning of SNL, they would have Chevy Chase, he would do Gerald Ford as himself,” remembered Spade. “He would just say, ‘I'm the president.’”
Right, said McKean, remembering Dan Aykroyd playing Richard Nixon without shaving off his mustache. “Nobody’s expecting us to look exactly like Nixon,” he said. “I’m doing my really funny Nixon, and it works.”
In some ways, McKean believes, he was hired for the impossible job of replacing master impressionist Hartman, an older presence who could play the dads and bosses in a way that a baby-faced Spade couldn’t.
“But you know, Phil took a lot more with him than just one thing,” McKean said. “He was remarkable.”
