Getting fired then rehired at Saturday Night Live? It’s not unheard of.
That’s what happened to Chris Parnell, who joined the show (for the first time) for its 24th season in 1998. The comedian was a part of some memorable sketches during his early years, including the now-legendary “More Cowbell” sketch, and was even promoted to repertory status after just one season. Still, that didn’t spare him from the guillotine of network budget cuts.
In 2001, after three seasons on the show, Parnell was axed from the cast along with Jerry Minor, who had just finished up his first season on the show.
“There would always be this thing that would happen every summer where we were supposed to be notified by July 1st, I think, whether our contracts were getting picked up for the next season, but that never happened,” Parnell later told The Daily Beast‘s Matt Wilstein on The Last Laugh podcast. “It was always like, ‘Hey, Lorne needs more time, he’s been traveling.’” (Seth Meyers recently shared that he had a similar experience following his first season at SNL.)
Parnell initially held out hope that he’d return, as he wasn’t the only cast member waiting on word. Eventually, his manager broke the news that he wasn’t being asked back.
Soon after, however, Parnell said that he “started to hear from people who worked on the show… that the door wasn’t completely shut, that I might be going back. So it was this roller coaster for a while.”
In the book Live from New York, Parnell recalled that Michaels had been telling his manager he might be asked back.
The firing seemed to take other cast members by surprise as well.
“There was such an outpouring of support from the cast and writers,” Parnell told The Daily Beat. At one point, writer T. Sean Shannon wrote a sketch about a Benihana chef being unjustly fired in response to Parnell’s dismissal. (Lorne had to read the stage directions for it at the table read.)
“And then, I think Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan went to bat for me, too,” Parnell said. “And I’m sure all of that helped a lot.”
Not long after Parnell had moved back to Los Angeles, word came down that he’d be getting a second chance at SNL. He asked for a guarantee that he’d return the following season if he said yes—a request that was denied. “I just finally decided that I love the job and I didn’t feel ready to go when I was let go,” he said in Live from New York.
Parnell returned to SNL in March 2002, 13 episodes into Season 27. “[Lorne] had me in the office and said, ‘You know, I made a mistake,’” Parnell revealed to The Daily Beast. “The only reference he made was to the budget,” he added in Live from New York. “That it was a budget issue, and that they’d hired four new cast members. He just blamed it on the budget.”
Parnell stayed with the show until 2006, bringing his total run to seven-and-a-half seasons. While that’s roughly the average length of time anybody stays at the show, Parnell wasn’t the one to make the decision to leave the second time around, either.
“I was like, if they’ll have me back, I’ll come back,” he later said. “But they didn’t.”
A shrinking budget had forced Michaels’ hand again. Cuts had to be made. Parnell was dropped from the cast a second time—though this time, there were no hard feelings.
“It was OK,” he told The Daily Beast. “It was much easier to take that time because I had a sense that it might be coming and I’d gotten to go back for five more seasons and do a lot more stuff.”
Parnell isn’t the only cast member to have been blessed with a rehiring. It happened to Jim Belushi, too—albeit under very different circumstances.
Belushi, whose late brother John Belushi had been an original Not Ready for Prime Time Player, joined SNL in 1983—an era when Michaels was gone and Dick Ebersol was running the show. “I was uncontrollable—throwing things down halls and angry and disruptive,” Belushi recounted in Live from New York.
That behavior led Ebersol to fire Belushi in December 1984, during his second season. He missed the Christmas show.
“I was out of control,” Belushi later told Vulture. “I was out of my mind. I was throwing a fire extinguisher at Dick Ebersol, a hissy fit.”
The whole incident eventually inspired Belushi to quit drinking, and he pled with Ebersol for a second chance. In January, he was hired back to continue filming Season 10.
“I went back to him with my tail between my legs. I dropped the ego, I got humble. I stopped drinking the rest of that season,” he said. “I begged [him] for forgiveness, and he put me on probation.”
Belushi was let go again at the end of that season, along with the rest of the cast, when Michaels returned as showrunner and cleaned house.
As cutthroat as Saturday Night Live can be, it seems one’s future at the show is never quite sealed.
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