5 ‘SNL’ Cast Members Who Should Have Stayed On the Show Forever
At this point, Kenan Thompson isn’t ever leaving Saturday Night Live — and can you blame him? His Kenan sitcom never caught on, and big-screen efforts like Fat Albert and Good Burger 2 didn’t exactly set the world on fire. So what? Thompson’s expert double-take is custom-made for live sketch comedy, and there’s no shame in being one of the best-ever SNL cast members. In fact, some other Saturday Night Live luminaries would have done well to follow Kenan’s career path. Here are 5 performer who were better at SNL than just about anything else.
Dana Carvey
A funny thing happened during the first half of SNL’s fiftieth season — Carvey showed up for a Joe Biden cameo, then decided to hang around. After failed attempts by celebrity guests and SNL cast members, Carvey blew the doors off with the definitive Biden. He also got laughs as Elon Musk and brought back the Church Lady, making the 70-year-old Carvey the season’s unlikely breakout star. He’s the poster child for comedians who are perfect for Saturday Night Live, but too broad and goofy to succeed in the movies (skip The Master of Disguise and thank me later).
Cheri Oteri
SNL was a mess at the end of the Adam Sandler/Chris Farley era, but a bunch of Groundlings came to the rescue. Will Ferrell eventually became the breakout star who killed at the movies, but Cheri Oteri was the one who hit it out of the park right from the jump. She was a recurring character machine, for better or worse, serving up Arianna the Spartan Cheerleader (17 appearances), Italian housewife Rita Delvecchio (7), horny wife Laura Zimmerman (7), disheveled weirdo Collette Reardon (6) and Morning Latte cohost Cass Van Raye. She got a couple of unaired sitcom pilots for her trouble, but her talents were better suited for SNL.
Dan Aykroyd
Hear me out. Aykroyd has enjoyed a fine film career, mostly as a second banana in movies both comedic (Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters) and dramatic (Driving Miss Daisy, My Girl). But Aykroyd’s quicksilver mind is best suited for improv and fast-talking sketch characters, like the frenzied pitchman for the Bass-O-Matic or Irwin Mainway, the sleazeball who sells children products like Bag O’ Glass and Johnny Switchblade: Adventure Punk. Aykroyd’s web-toed eccentricity is electric in a four-minute sketch, but doesn’t work as well anywhere else.
Kate McKinnon
McKinnon’s post-SNL career has been quiet by choice, opting for writing children’s books while living on a farm far away from Studio 8H. Just as well, since her finely observed oddballs are terrifically funny in sketch-sized doses. Greta Gerwig figured out the perfect post-SNL role for McKinnon, since Weird Barbie in the Barbie movie was practically a sketch character. Maybe McKinnon still has a future as a character actor in some streaming series down the road, but it feels like SNL was the perfect vehicle for her idiosyncratic comic talents.
Norm Macdonald
Norm didn’t have a choice about leaving SNL, but was there ever a better vehicle for his talents than Weekend Update? He wasn’t even a particularly good sketch comic, but no one before or since delivered the fake news any better. The guy wasn’t an actor — his sitcom Norm and movie Dirty Work were fun, but not because of Macdonald’s thespian chops — and his stabs at streaming and Internet talk shows were more quirky than great. Imagine a world in which Macdonald had been stationed permanently at the Weekend Update desk — everyone would have been a winner.
