With the clock ticking on Saturday Night Live’s 50th season, speculation is whirring at full steam. Who will say goodbye and how will they do it—with a Kristen Wiig-style send off, or in sketch form a la Kate McKinnon? The art of the SNL farewell is a wide-ranging one, but it’s also a relatively new phenomenon.
Fans of more recent SNL generations may have grown used to getting an opportunity to say goodbye to their favorite performers, but it hasn’t always been common for SNL to telegraph its cast departures on the air. Fittingly, it can largely be traced back to one of SNL’s most integral players of all-time: Phil Hartman.
Even by 1994, momentous endings weren’t entirely new to SNL. The show’s Season 5 finale, which came at a moment of uncertainty for SNL as a whole, saw the cast walking out of Studio 8H at goodnights before the camera moved up to the “On Air” sign turning off. The “Weird Year” of Season 11 ended on a cliffhanger that trapped each of the show’s cast members (except Jon Lovitz) in a burning room. (Most would, in fact, be fired.)
Cast members even occasionally referenced their impending departures on air. Dennis Miller did it in the cold open of his final show in 1991. But Hartman’s valediction was the first time an individual cast member was truly fêted on their way out the door.
Hartman was famously known as ”The Glue” among the cast and writers by the time he ended his run in 1994. To send him off, the show crafted a goodbye sketch that heralded the end of both Season 19 and Hartman’s eight years. It began with Hartman introducing the Saturday Night Live Family Singers, comprised of the show’s cast, many of whom were dressed in costume as their most famous recurring characters. Singing “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music, the performers exited one by one until it was only Hartman and Chris Farley on the stage. “I can’t imagine a more dignified way to end my eight years on this program,” Hartman said as he cradled a sleeping Farley (in full Matt Foley “Van Down by the River” regalia) at the foot of home base.
The sketch was written by longtime SNL writer Robert Smigel, who himself had exited the show a year earlier. Smigel had intended the sketch as a “bit of self-referential snark,” he later explained on social media.
“I first thought of it just as a funny way to end a season. I loved making fun of catchphrases and had done it a few times on the show,” Smigel tells LateNighter. “As I wrote it, I realized Phil leaving would make for a funny ending with Chris on his lap like the smallest child, falling asleep. The poignancy really only hit me when he did it on stage.”
As poignant a goodbye as it was, the sketch would take on new meaning years later. Farley, who left SNL the following season, died in December 1997. Five months later came the shock of Phil Hartman’s death. From that point on, through many ‘Best Of’ specials and highlight reels, that image of Hartman and Farley has become indelible. At the time, though, it was simply the show saying ‘so long’ to one of its most beloved performers.
“A few of [the cast] really hated it. And the crowd didn’t exactly revel in the concept,” Smigel said of the sketch. “But somehow it allowed for Phil, no doubt one of the all-time SNLers, to say a sincere goodbye to his audience on camera, however silly the setup.”
SNL would find more ways to say goodbye—with varying degrees of sincerity—in the years to come.
Some would be subtle. Some would announce the talent’s exit outright, like Will Ferrell’s “Will’s Final Show” in 2002 (the first goodbye sketch that aired after Hartman’s).
Some goodbyes would be worked into a sketch, like Jimmy Fallon’s Grease-inspired rendition of “Summer Nights.” (Earlier in the episode, Fallon ended Update with a quick announcement that it would be his last show.)
Some would feature little to no premise, breaking the fourth wall to bask in the emotion. That was the case in 2012, when Season 37 wrapped with perhaps SNL’s most sincere goodbye to date. In a sketch written by Colin Jost, Mick Jagger celebrated SNL’s “graduating class” before singling out Kristen Wiig. Wiig danced with a procession of her castmates and a rare walk-on from Lorne Michaels as Arcade Fire sang “She’s A Rainbow” and “Ruby Tuesday.” While Hartman’s last sketch had started off with some snark, this musical moment was a genuine heart-on-sleeve goodbye.
“Usually when someone leaves, there’s a goodbye sketch at read-through. A lot of it can be an inside joke… like a funny thing that you read at the end of the day, and everyone’s crying,” Wiig later told Howard Stern, adding that she was taken aback when she learned her tribute would actually be in the show. “[It was] one of the best moments of my life, and saddest too.”
“Wiig’s [farewell sketch] really got me,” Smigel told LateNighter. “The affection that cast had for each other was special.”
Perhaps that affection is what accounted for the onslaught of farewell fanfare that began with that 2012 finale.
Earlier in the show, Andy Samberg delivered his own parting words, reconvening Chris Parnell and his Lonely Island partners for “Lazy Sunday 2,” a long-awaited follow-up to the Digital Short that made his bones and ushered SNL into a new era. “On these New York streets, I honed my fake rap penmanship,” he sang. “That’s how it began, and that’s how I’m-a finish it.”
The next year brought more stirring adieus. On the Season 38 finale, Bill Hader’s Stefon wed Seth Meyers. The show closed out with Fred Armisen reprising his ‘Ian Rubbish and the Bizarros’ band alongside Hader and some musician friends for “Top of the Pops”—another musical tribute that was no premise, all sincerity. A third “Bongo’s Clown Room” sketch was to be Jason Sudeikis’ farewell for that same episode, but it was cut for time.
Months later, Hader, Armisen, Samberg, and Amy Poehler returned to help Meyers sign off from Update for the last time. The anchor bid farewell with some words of gratitude as he choked up.
In Season 42, Vanessa Bayer and Bobby Moynihan were given a more subtle tribute in the sketch “Senior Video,” where they played high schoolers putting on a year-end sketch at their graduation.
SNL went another five years before it saw another on-air goodbye—but there were a slew of them. In just one episode, the show wrote off Kate McKinnon, Pete Davidson, and Aidy Bryant. McKinnon tearfully said goodbye in the cold open “Final Encounter.” “Thanks for letting me stay a while,” her Miss Rafferty character said as she boarded a spaceship and delivered one last “Live from New York.”
On Weekend Update, Bryant bid adieu in character during a Trend Forecast. Minutes later, Davidson reflected on his run and thanked Lorne Michaels for his support in an Update piece anchored by friend and ferry partner Colin Jost. A cut-for-time sketch that portrayed Davidson paying tribute to Michaels in another Eminem parody, “Forgot About Lorne,” also made its way online after the episode.
Months later, Cecily Strong would receive Saturday Night Live’s most recent sendoff. She first said goodbye on Update while reprising her Cathy Ann character—doing a quick rendition of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ and finally getting her cigarette lit. At the end of the show, SNL again turned to music to finish the job as host and Elvis star Austin Butler serenaded Strong with Presley’s “Blue Christmas.”
The normalization of goodbye sketches has led SNL fans to enter fierce speculation mode at the end of every season, wondering if the finale will stage some sort of sendoff that essentially confirms who won’t be returning the following fall. But it has also caused some sketches to be misunderstood or debated as goodbyes. With so much changing all the time at SNL, oftentimes, the truth is murky.
Season 34’s closing sketch, a star-studded rendition of Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon,” was assumed by many to be a farewell to Darrell Hammond. Hammond later told the Saturday Night Network that he never saw it as his goodbye moment. Colin Jost, who penned the sketch, recalled in his memoir setting out to write a farewell sketch—not necessarily for Hammond, but for the group as a whole. Still, he thought it fitting that Hammond get the last laugh with a final line.
Pete Davidson’s Season 47 mid-season closer “An Evening with Pete” and Cecily Strong’s giant Jeanine Pirro wine bath in Season 46 (also set to Sinatra’s “My Way”) both generated rumblings that those cast members wouldn’t return after those episodes. In both cases, they did—though it may still be that those sketches were intended as sendoffs before their departures were delayed.
But what the show intends is only half the result. Like so many things in the SNL universe, finale sketches often take on a life of their own among fans. Whether intended or not, a cast member’s last big moment can become permanent lore. That’s par for the course with SNL, a show that has inspired a rare sports-like fandom among its viewers over the years.
Perhaps that’s why farewell sketches have become so much more common. Fifty years ago, there was no telling how deep the connection between viewers and SNL’s motley crew of comics would be, but as the SNL50 anniversary season drove home, the show has become an institution bigger than itself. When a cast member leaves, it’s not just the Not Ready for Primetime Players who are saying goodbye to a family member. It’s those watching at home, too.
Saturday Night Live’s Season 50 finale airs this Saturday, May 19th.
