Seth Meyers’ SNL sketch for Michael Bublé was more prescient than either of them could have ever realized at the time.
Bublé was a guest on Late Night With Seth Meyers on Monday, and the two took a moment to chat about “Hamm and Bublé,” a Saturday Night Live sketch that Meyers wrote in 2010 for show host Jon Hamm and Bublé, who was the musical guest.
“You did me a huge favor once,” Meyers said. “One of my favorite things I’d ever written was called ‘Hamm and Bublé.’”
“Changed my life,” Bublé quickly replied.
In the sketch, Hamm and Bublé play exaggerated versions of themselves running a ham-and-champagne-focused restaurant which riffs on their last names. Hamm’s character forced Bublé to pronounce his name like “bubbly” for the sake of the restaurant. (It was a sequel to Hamm’s first product pitch parody when he hosted in 2008: “John Hamm’s Jon Ham.”
When Meyers presented Bublé with the idea, he immediately took a liking to it.
“When I read what Seth Meyers wrote, I think I probably hugged him 10 times,” Bublé told the New York Post after the show aired. “I was actually more comfortable doing that than I was singing. I just had dinner with Lorne Michaels. If they’d like me to, I would [host an episode] in a second.”
In 2019, Bublé received an offer from PepsiCo. to star in a Super Bowl ad for its sparkling water brand, Bubly. He was sent a concept for the commercial, but quickly found it to be all too familiar: It was based around pronouncing “Bubly” as “Bublé.”
“My first thought was, ‘You stole this from Seth!’” the singer said.
“Can I tell you something funny?,” Meyers responded. “That was my first reaction, too!”
Meyers went on to admit that the idea wasn’t that groundbreaking. “I just pronounced his name different… I came there pretty naturally,” he joked.
But as Bublé noted, the singer continues to appear in Bubly ads all these years later.
After the episode aired, “Lorne had asked me to sing at a benefit,” Bublé recounted to Meyers. “You introduced me, and you basically said that you had given me the greatest thing I’d ever had in my career… Basically, [you] had made me. And you did.”
