First on LateNighter: We can only guess it’s not every day that Lorne Michaels gets pitched a sketch by a sitting United States senator. But that’s exactly what happened when Al Franken called in an idea the week Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live in 2015.
Franken—an SNL alum who spent fifteen years on the show’s writing staff years before being elected to the Senate in 2008—says he reached out to Michaels with a simple concept: Trump’s hair as a vast construction site tended by tiny engineers.
The sketch that originally emerged from that premise opened with Taran Killam leading a team of miniaturized scientists—played by Cecily Strong, Bobby Moynihan, Beck Bennett, and Kenan Thompson—on a guided tour of Trump’s scalp, complete with orange hair follicles rising like skyscrapers and a mysterious “Nexus” staircase straight out of an M.C. Escher painting.
Writers later reworked the piece to center on an elite unit of Defense Department operatives miniaturized to protect Trump’s hair during a windy meeting with Vladimir Putin. Though that revised version of the sketch made it as far as dress rehearsal, it was ultimately cut before air, later appearing on YouTube as a “cut for time” sketch (below).
Asked about it today, Franken told LateNighter, “As I recall, I just gave Lorne the premise for a sketch in which Trump’s hair is depicted as a construction site. So I had no part in writing this sketch and never saw it until now. I understand why it was cut, although Trump’s performance in it, as you can tell, is brilliant.”
Learn more about “Trump’s Hair” and eight other cut sketches from Trump’s 2015 SNL hosting stint, and subscribe to our daily newsletter to receive stories like this in your inbox.
