A year and a half before she joined Saturday Night Live, Ego Nwodim was getting laughs on the Disney Channel. The pre-SNL performer popped up on two episodes of the kids’ sitcom Liv and Maddie.
The Disney Channel series starred Dove Cameron as both titular characters: Liv, a famous teen actress fresh off her own TV show, and Maddie, her non-famous identical twin sister. Nwodim played Ms. Karsch, a teacher at Boyle & Oppenheimer Official Magnet School, the science-focused school that characters Parker, Val, and Joey attend.
Nwodim first’s appearance on the show came on the Season 4 episode “Tiny House-A-Rooney,” which follows Maddie and her friends as they build a tiny home for a musician friend. They make use of the school’s science classroom, thanks to Nwodim’s Ms. Karsch, who reveals she’s been bribed with cookies to let them in.
As brief as her scene is, the line delivery is classic Nwodim. “If you blow anything up, I wasn’t here,” she matter-of-factly quips. Later in the episode, Cameron’s character goes toe-to-toe with Nwodim’s, prompting an intimidated Ms. Karsch to admit “Remind me never to cross you.”
Nwodim’s performance must have left a good impression on the show, as she returned just three episodes later for “Voice-A-Rooney,” as the teacher overseeing a national science competition called Mars Madness. Nwodim’s screen time increases here, with the Mars Madness competition getting three scenes over the course of the episode.
By the time Nwodim’s episodes of Liv & Maddie aired in early 2017, the comedian already had a few TV appearances on her resume, including Adam Ruins Everything and Disney Channel’s K.C. Undercover. Off-screen, her comedy career was well under way by that point: Nwodim had already regular appearances on the popular podcast Comedy Bang! Bang!, and in 2016 was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival. By the fall of 2018, Nwodim joined the cast of SNL, becoming the show’s only new hire for its 44th season.
Nwodim wrapped her seventh season on SNL in May. Her recent work outside of SNL has given her significantly more screen time than her Disney Channel days, including guest hosting Today with Jenna and Friends and starring in the one-season Mr. Throwback.
