205. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: A Philosophy for Life
This month marks the 50th anniversary of long-running (fifty years!) American sketch comedy TV show, Saturday Night Live. To celebrate, I thought it worth taking a look at the philosophical life lessons its fifty year success story can teach us.
1) “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
Famously (the clue is in the title) Saturday Night Live is a live show, and its ability to produce five decades of comedy comes only from an intentional lack of perfectionism. The deadline, the time-slot, these are the reasons for making the sketches. The mission is not to wait until the perfect sketch is produced and ready to be filmed, but rather to have something to fill the air-time with and make it as good as possible in the limited time-frame.
This is actually the philosophy behind Philosophy Unleashed in many ways. The mission here was to produce a philosophy essay every week during term time that covered something not on the exam specifications. To do this I set myself an arbitrary deadline - 6am on Monday morning. And, as regular readers know, the post doesn’t get published because it’s ready; it gets published because it’s 6am on a Monday morning during term-time. These posts are always first thoughts, rather than finished thoughts. But just like an SNL sketch, that doesn’t mean they are drafted and re-drafted and polished up as much as they can be before airtime. However, certainly, if I worried about ensuring every argument I put up here was watertight and perfect before I hit ‘publish’, most weeks the page would be empty.
The same philosophy has been invaluable to me in the classroom. Education has enormous amounts of research, theory and conceptual framework around it, and as any newly training teacher can tell you, it is possible to spend hours trying to produce the perfect lesson to tick every box of what a ‘good’ lesson should be. However…in reality, a full timetable of teaching leaves teachers will very little planning time. If we tried to make every lesson perfect, we would be left without living an actual life for ourselves. So, as a teacher, I try to make every lesson as good as possible, and put great frameworks in place to help with this, such as solid schemes of work and clear end-goals for assessment and learning, but my lesson period one on a Monday morning (or period six on a Wednesday, period four on a Friday, etc…) isn’t going on because it’s ready; it’s going on because it’s period one on Monday (or period six on Wednesday, period four on Friday, etc…).
In 2023 I wrote a whole twelve song album, one song per month, simply because I set the challenge for myself to write and record a song every month for twelve months. The songs weren’t recorded because they were ready; they were recorded because it was the end of the month. In 2025 I am repeating the experiment but releasing the songs each month instead of waiting until December to release them all. They aren’t released because they’re ready; they’re released because it’s the end of the month. We can tweak things forever. But at some point the tweaking needs to stop. Perfection is largely impossible anyway. Better to get something half-decent out there than keep brilliant things trapped hidden from public view because they’re not yet perfect.
2) Yes, and…
Although very little of SNL is improvised and the whole thing is tightly scripted by the time it gets on air, it begins with bold experimentation and saying yes, and to opportunities. Before writers go off to write sketches, they sit at a pitch meeting and throw out possible ideas to that week’s host and producer, Lorne Michaels. Many of these pitches are nothing more than a germ of an idea. A premise. ‘What if we put person X in situation Y?’ The writers swing with nothing but get a feel for the response. If people like it then they’ll go off and give it a go - see what they can produce. The life lesson here is in having faith in your own creative powers and saying yes to opportunity rather than waiting to know if you can do something before you offer up your services.
My background is in philosophy. BA, MA, PhD. And as an atheist, I took little interest in theology throughout my studies, which focused mainly on ethical and political philosophy. But when I decided I wanted to become a teacher, and saw that the only route to philosophy teaching in the UK school system was through Religious Education, I said ‘sure, I can teach that’ even though I had barely any clue. I went home over the summer before I started teaching and I brushed up my subject knowledge. Could I teach A-level? I was asked. Sure! I replied. More learning as I went. Today though, I have been successfully teaching Religious Studies alongside Philosophy for almost fifteen years. It started by saying yes, and instead of saying no.
In 1999, when I was a sixth former, the drummer from a band called Raggity Anne got in touch with me. He’d been offered a tour of Italy for his band but the band had broken up. He asked if my band, Academy Morticians, would like to step in and do the tour with him instead. We could create a sort of hybrid group - Raggity Morticians - and play a bunch of classic Raggity Anne songs as well as some new ones we’d write together. I did not know how to play a single Raggity Anne song and my fellow bandmate wasn’t even really a fan - but I said yes. We learnt the songs, we had a great time, and we even got some random millionaire’s kid to pay to extend our trip a few days so he could record the new songs for us. It began by saying yes, and… instead of no.
An actor friend of mine was offered a role on a hit TV show. But can he ride a horse? They asked. Of course I can, was his response. Even though he couldn’t. But by the time he arrived on set he could.
Improv comedy is predicated on the idea that half the battle is negativity. Eliminate the ‘no’ by saying ‘yes’ to everything and you can create something from nothing.
‘I’m here for my blood test doctor’ is a nice starting line for a scene as it tells us why we are here, where we are, and even tells the actor’s scene partner who they are: the doctor. However, if the scene partner says ‘no’ to the offers there, we get nowhere:
‘Blood test? I’m not sure why? This is a fish and chip shop and I’m not a doctor.’
The scene is dead. But say ‘yes’ to the idea and we see something different happen…
‘Certainly sir, I’ve been expecting you. Please come in…’
Now we’re getting somewhere. But improv doesn’t just ask us to say ‘yes’, it specifically asks us to say ‘yes, and…’ because the and bit helps build on whatever the last idea was. If we each ‘yes, and…’ each other’s half-baked ideas, they will end up fully-baked between us all. See…
‘I’m here for my blood test doctor’
‘Certainly sir, I’ve been expecting you. Please come in. Your chart here says you’ve been experiencing strange voices and occasional bouts of blasphemy and head-spinning. The bloods will let us know if it’s something simple like a brain tumour, or something more difficult like demonic possession.’
‘I do have a family history of brain tumours, but then I have also been recently spending a lot of time disturbing burial grounds and stealing ancient relics said to contain evil spirits, so it will be helpful to know which one we can rule out.’ (Then, in a deep, Satanic voice) ‘Your mother darns socks in hell!’ (Back to normal voice) ‘Oh, sorry doctor’…
We have ourselves a scene now. The first player, who might have only had a vague idea about going to the doctors is now ‘yes, and…’ing the suggestion they might be possessed by a demon and, just as they gave the character of the doctor to their scene partner, they now have a character of their own to play, complete with demonic voices.
When we say ‘yes, and…’ instead of ‘no’ we let ourselves open up to possibilities of doing things we didn’t know were possible. Saturday Night Live might not be improvised when it hits our TV screens. But many of the writers and actors have backgrounds in improv which informs their writing and rehearsing process immensely. More than that, it gives them the attitude that allows them to make the impossible possible every Saturday night.
As I tell students when I teach them improv (I’ve done improv comedy on and off around the country since 2002), anyone can make stuff up on the spot. That bit of improv isn’t special or interesting. What makes improv special or interesting is that when we do it, it’s actually good. The magic trick of improv is learning the techniques and tricks to reliably turn nothing into something every time. Take a germ of an idea and make it into a fully fledged scene or even an entire play. And it all begins, as in the SNL pitch meeting, with saying ‘yes, and…’ instead of ‘no’. Saying ‘yes’ before you’ve even thought out fully whether what you’ve said ‘yes’ to is possible.
3) Collaboration is key
‘Yes, and…’ only works if you have a scene partner to add some ‘ands’ to your ‘yes’. SNL is famous for being a very competitive, dog-eat-dog environment, and many former cast members report the stress and anxiety of working in a place where there is no guarantee your idea will end up on TV and where your contract might not always be renewed for next year. However, the consistent story coming out of 50 years of the show is that success comes when people work together. When performers find a writer they gel with and whose ideas they can bring to life, when teams of performers find chemistry together that allows them to shine on stage, and when the weekly guest host is open to playing with others rather than protecting their own ego and reputation. This is another reason why some of the best performers and writers are also improvisers: you can’t do good improv if you’re only thinking about yourself. Improv is a collaborative group activity where a performer might be the star of a scene, or do nothing but run in and be a tree moving in the breeze when the scene requires it. Likewise, the truly great SNL performers are those who can carry a whole scene on their shoulders and also support someone else’s scene perfectly. When the show goes live at 11:30pm on a Saturday Night (not because it’s ready, but because it’s 11:30), it has come together only because a massive collaborative crew of individuals have all worked together on this common goal. Not just the writers and performers (the sketch load divided between many, not just the job of one head writer) but the crew who have to build sets and costumes and makeup ideas for these sketches in such a short amount of time. The directors and camera operators who bring the page into the physical world and those amazing people who ensure that all the moving pieces of the live show work by dragging performers to the right stage at the right time and ensure their quick changes are made in a timely fashion. Not to mention the audience who also need to bring their energy or else the show falls flat, and the viewers at home who, if they weren’t watching, would make the whole endeavour feel absurd.
Too often in this capitalistic, individualistic, atomistic world we pretend success is all about strong, isolated genius individuals. It never is. There is always a whole crew behind those successful people - from parents, to siblings, to partners, to friends, to editors, to writers, to publicists and agents, to directors and producers, to creative collaborators, to technical wizards - who make it happen. One could watch SNL and think of the famous names who graduated from the cast into mainstream success (Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, etc.) but to do so ignores that they could only do what they did because they were helped along the way by the entire organisation that makes Saturday Night Live work. And before that, the improv or comedy troupe that they were a part of and in which they honed the talents which got them their audition for SNL.
A show doesn’t stick around for fifty years unless a lot of people help it. Nothing in life thrives and survives in isolation - life is a collaborative effort and we forget that at our peril.
4) Longevity Requires the Odd Sabbatical
Lorne Michaels is credited with creating Saturday Night Live and during the 50th anniversary celebrations we find him still at the helm. Yet he has only been part of the show for 45 years. How does that maths work? Because after the first five years, Lorne took five years off to work on other projects. When he came back in 1985, he never left.
Philosopher, bell hooks, said once ‘all teachers - in every teaching situation from kindergarten to university settings - need time away from teaching at some point in their career.’ And as someone who (as described in my book Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher) once thought he was quitting teaching completely only to find the time away from the classroom merely rekindled my love of teaching, I have seen firsthand the transformation in perspective a sabbatical can bring. SNL not only benefitted from Lorne Michaels’ time away, but itself doesn’t do show after show after show until it burns itself out. It usually does a schedule of two or three shows on followed by two or three weeks off. And then there’s the long summer break too, where cast members and others can explore other projects or simply take some glorious time off to come back reenergised for the next season. The SNL schedule (like teaching) can be brutal - pitching ideas from nothing on Monday, writing all night Tuesday, read through on Wednesday and scene selection, then re-writes and rehearsals until dress rehearsal on Saturday, final re-writes before 11:30pm and then finally the week ends at 1am Sunday before the after-party, the after-after party (which takes out most of Sunday) and the whole cycle begins again on Monday. Without taking those regular pauses - and for some people stepping completely away for a while - you would go mad. And the same is true for any high-stress and unrelenting work environment. We need time away so we can appreciate what we like about it, limit what we don’t like, and decide if we really want to be there.
5) Not Everything is For Everyone
Linked to taking time away is the recognition that there are many amazing comedians, comedy writers, and people working in television comedy who have nothing to do with Saturday Night Live and would not want to work there. It’s just not the environment for them. This includes some people who tried it there first and realised quickly that it was not a successful environment for them.
Famously Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm writer, Larry David, struggled during his time on SNL. Clearly a brilliant creative mind, his mind did not work well in the SNL system and, once liberated from it, it thrived elsewhere. Damon Wayans and Chris Rock both notoriously struggled with the systemic racism on SNL, with Wayans even getting himself intentionally fired, and became huge successes once they’d left and were able to be their authentic selves without the NBC editing. Robert Downey Jnr only made it a year as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Marc Maron, the successful podcaster, comic and actor spent years dwelling on his own failure to get hired by Saturday Night Live, even as he was interviewing the US President and having features written about him in the New York Times. More recently I think of Tim Robinson. I remembered this guy floundering on SNL for a few seasons and not really doing anything of note. Yet when he left he created one of the funniest sketch comedy shows ever, I Think You Should Leave, on Netflix.
The point is, we have to find the environment that fits for us, and it might not be the one which works for other people, even if it seems like somewhere incredibly successful and like the sort of place you should aspire to. I see this with students often when thinking about university choices. Oxford, Cambridge - the assumption is that these ‘great’ universities should be somewhere you want to go. But they are not for everyone. It doesn’t make you any ‘lesser’ to not get in, or even to not try and get in at all. In my own case I think of my friend who went to study philosophy at Cambridge the same year I studied at Cardiff. All these years later I’m still doing philosophy and the friend is not, mainly because the way philosophy was done at Cambridge sucked the joy out of it for him. Meanwhile I, at Cardiff, was able to explore further into the political and ethical philosophy which actually fascinated me and my passion was well nurtured.
This doesn’t mean that Cambridge is bad. Just that I knew back then it wasn’t for me. The focus on analytic, linguistic philosophy just wasn’t what I was interested in. And as an anarchist, the stuffy traditions and sense of elitism Cambridge (or Oxford) brings was anathema to me. However, many others who do like that stuff and do love their philosophy deeply linguistic will thrive there.
The artist, Scroobius Pip, runs a record label and its slogan sums up this philosophy well: ‘we may not be for you…and that’s fine.’ SNL is not the be-all and end-all of comedy, even if it is an esteemed television institution, and it knows this. Many people have not been hired by the show over the years - or have left - not because they are bad, but because it becomes clear to everyone that this is not the right environment for their particular talents. This is true for all of us, in all of our various jobs, hobbies and ambitions: sometimes we’re just in the wrong place.
6) If It Ain’t Broke…
SNL is a peculiar place to work. It has maintained the same unique - and arguably unhelpful - schedule for putting on a show since 1975. There is no good reason for writers to have to stay up all night on a Tuesday writing other than the fact that this is what has always been done on the show. Sketch selection could be emailed instead of presented on an old-fashioned cork board with coloured cards. For example, it is possible to do the maths and figure out a year in advance how many sketches will be needed to fill the allotted number of episodes and spend all summer writing them long in advance of filming. Lines could be learned instead of being put on very obvious cue cards (SNL is famous for its actors often blatantly looking at cue cards instead of each other in sketches) and normal working hours could be kept.
But…the weird and wonderful way in which it is done, no matter how possibly irrational, has worked, and continues to work. Proof of concept exists in its track record. And it reminds us that we don’t all work in the same way and that one person’s normal and obvious may not be another’s.
At the same time, other shows have tried to emulate this approach and failed. Why? Because it wasn’t right for them. They were following someone else’s blueprint.
The way anything is done tends to be arbitrary, and one random system can easily replace another, but once we accept that any formal system is fundamentally flawed we realise that the most important thing for making something work is buy-in. So long as the cast, crew and writers all agree with the ridiculous schedule and all hands are on deck, it works. For this reason, if you find the special alchemy that works in your walk of life, with your particular cohort, you shouldn’t feel the need to conform to how others are doing it if your non-conformist way is working for you. At the same time, if you try to emulate what others do because you think it’s the system alone which brings success, you will find out very quickly that this is a mistake.
When I was younger the guitarist in my band read in an album inlay about how punk band, Screeching Weasel, slept all night at the studio in which they recorded their album. He became obsessed with making us sleep in a studio too. Grudgingly, we did. And soon found out that the reason we didn’t sleep in a studio to record our music was because we didn’t necessarily all get along as friends in the band. Pretty soon after recording, the band broke up.
Perhaps Screeching Weasel slept at the studio out of necessity? Maybe it was far from their homes, unlike us, who spent nights in a studio twenty minutes from our home simply to tick a random box in a guitarist’s mind? Perhaps Screeching Weasel slept at the studio because they could record all night? We couldn’t. The engineer left at 8pm. We were just killing time until he arrived again the next morning. And perhaps Screeching Weasel slept at the studio because they were really good friends and enjoyed hanging out with each other? Maybe we should have tried that before recording instead?
Returning to schools, this is also one of the core problems of the UK education system and its regime of inspection: the standardisation of all schools to a particular model desired by a particular body of inspectors. We pretend we can find a perfect system that, if only everybody followed it, would ensure fantastic educational outcomes for all. But it just isn’t that easy. Each community, each cohort, each set of colleagues, in each unique geographic space, need to find their own successful way of doing things that works for them. Even the enforced idea that school starts early and ends early (useful for childcare, but not necessarily for education) could be something some schools might like to reject - start late and end later? Educate all night Tuesday into Wednesday and take Thursday and Friday off? And maybe the school itself is not the best place for education to happen?
SNL reminds us we have to find our own unique rhythms and see what works, even if the rest of the world tells us there are better, more efficient ways of doing things.
7) Waste is the true efficiency
Speaking of efficiency, one of my pet peeves is people who think the way to get results is to target wastage. The fact is it is from the freedom that waste allows that good things usually come. SNL is built on waste. Sketches which are slaved over only to not be selected after read through, or ones which are worked on even more only to be dropped after dress. Cast members who fail and are fired so that new, brilliant, members can take their place. Sets built for sketches which never see the light of day. Impressions developed only for a different performer to be cast in the role. Even the copious amounts of food that cover the table during read throughs but which don’t get eaten - from all the comfort of this waste an environment is created where people are not afraid to give their best effort and fail spectacularly so that others might succeed. In an average season of Saturday Night Live there are maybe ten or so truly great all-time sketches. In an average episode maybe one. But it’s those ten which keep the enduring legacy and make audiences come back for more. Just as a leading batter in baseball misses seven out of ten swings, the hit to flop ratio for long-term success is surprisingly low. But it is the wealth of bad sketches which makes the truly brilliant ones shine through. And without all the wasted energy on the flops, we wouldn’t have got to the brilliant ones.
Producer Lorne Michaels knows this, and there are numerous stories of cast members feeling lost and flailing in their first season on the show wishing Lorne would fire them for their lack of airtime only for him to tell them that it takes about three seasons for a new cast member to finally do well. The first two years are a learning curve, full of failure and waste. But if you can get through it, from year three you will do well.
Another lesson for life: don’t expect immediate success. Fail and fail again better. Turn ever L into a lesson. Learn from those mistakes and misfires and, eventually, you’ll get there.
This is the number one lesson I tell A-level philosophy students - and not all of them get it. But, those who do, they flourish: write terrible essays until you know how to write good ones. Don’t worry if you’re getting Ds and even Es for the whole of Year 12. So long as you are figuring out what’s going wrong each time, those Ds and Es will become Bs and As by the actual exams in Year 13. But sadly in our culture of immediate gratification not everyone has the nerve to allow themselves to fail sufficiently that they can succeed. It feels like a waste of time or opportunity instead of what it really is: true efficiency. The best way to get to where you want to go, when where you want to go isn’t easy, is to allow yourself plenty of time to waste failing a lot first. SNL has flourished by living by this principle since 1975.
8) Find Your Own Voice
SNL has brought us all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas over the years because SNL has been most successful when weird and wonderful writers and performers find their voice and present us with things we have never seen or heard before. When people come into the show trying to emulate their heroes, the audience grows tired. We’ve seen it before. But when people come into the show wearing their heroes on their sleeves but also being their own authentic self, we fall in love.
Lorne Michaels often uses this tactic to get new performers over with the audience: he gives them a spot on Weekend Update where they are being themselves and not a comedy character. He did this on Canadian sketch show, Kids in the Hall too (another show he produced). the performers, as themselves, let the audience see who they really were and, in so doing, gave us buy-in to their performances.
When you mimic someone else, it makes us think about someone else. When you show us who you are, we want to see more of you. Nowhere is this more visible than the show’s most successful celebrity impressions. Having the voice and look down is not enough. The best and most enduring celebrity impressions have been those which give their version of the celebrity a point of view and, by doing so, show us a little bit of themselves.
We could all do with showing more of our authentic selves to the world instead of trying to pretend to be something we’re not.
9) Music makes everything better
SNL has never just been a comedy show. It has always had musical guests too. Comedy is great and everyone loves to laugh (or at least they should - that’s another core SNL philosophy of life), but we also need music to nourish the soul.
Theoretically there is no reason for two musical breaks to interrupt the comedy. Even clinging to the idea of a ‘variety’ show, the music could be within the show itself, cabaret style. But since the start SNL has been a performance space for brilliant musical artists to share their songs with the world. Music is important, the show tells us, and we need to listen even if it means stopping the laughter for a moment or two.
There is a reason that as well as having a three hour anniversary episode of the show, SNL had a 50th anniversary three hour musical concert too. And even with all that music the night before, the anniversary show still had plenty of musical guests performing too. Music is always important.
I would certainly concur that a day without listening to some music feels like a day I haven’t lived well.
10) You Can’t Ignore The News
Another thing there since the start at SNL is the ‘fake news’ segment, Weekend Update. But even outside of parodying an actual news broadcast, SNL has always done sketches which lampoon ongoing political realities.
Again, one could ask why? Certainly comedy doesn’t need to be political and address what’s going on in the world so pointedly. One could imagine a version of a weekly live comedy sketch show that deals solely in the surreal and the mundane without ever once touching on the news. Plenty of non-live, pre-recorded sketch comedy shows could be described in that way, so why does SNL include so much topical comedy?
One reason is proof that it is live. A topical sketch is the equivalent of a hostage holding up today’s newspaper to show they are still alive. But more than that it is because while it is easy to bury our head in the sand and use comedy as a distraction from all the horrors of the world, an alternative use of comedy is to highlight that horror to us to make it explicit. Once explicit we can do something about it. Or at least learn to cope with what has been exposed.
Ignoring the world doesn’t change anything. The horror goes on regardless. Laughing at the horror doesn’t necessarily change it either, but it at least acknowledges that there is something there which needs changing instead of hiding the fact. Just as music is important for a well-rounded life, so too is being engaged with the world around us and having a critical and considered point of view about what is going on. SNL has shared its takes on global events with the world - for good and for bad - for fifty years and reminded its audiences that ignorance is not an option. If these lunatics in Studio 8H who never get to see daylight can still keep up to date with the news while they work their insane schedule, then so can you. Turn on, tune in, but do not drop out. Stay engaged. Stay alert. Stay angry. Stay accountable. Including being accountable to yourself. One of the wonderful things about Saturday Night Live over the years has been its self-referential and self-reflective pieces where they directly deal with criticism about the show, about its sketches, about its own myopic politics and structural problems.
Being engaged with the world means being engaged with your own place in that world and how you might need to make some changes to yourself to be consistent with the values you profess.
11) The Goodnights
I’m sure there are a million more life lessons I can squeeze out of a lifetime obsession with SNL, but just as the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30, the show doesn’t end because it’s said everything it wants to say; it ends because it’s 1am. The saxophone is playing and the host is saying thanks to the musical guest. People are clapping and it is time to go home.
But just one more thing (a life lesson from Columbo): the formal goodnights of SNL are another unnecessary but wonderful part of the institution. Take a bow and accept your flowers for a job well done. Why else does the show make a big deal out of its 50th anniversary? Because it deserves to be thanked for what it has done, just as every performer deserves their applause during the goodnights each week for pulling another impossible performance out of the bag in less than a week and making the magic happen. Gratitude is important. As important as music, as important as engagement with the world. Saying thanks for what people have done and receiving thanks for your own contributions. So I shall end this lengthy post by giving my thanks for the wonderful Saturday Night Live, still as crucial a part of my life in 2025 as it was when I first heard about it in 1987 when I watched the 1984 film Ghostbusters and learnt the names Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. Thanks SNL for making me laugh my entire laugh - and here’s to fifty more years!
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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