Saturday Night Live may be a cutthroat environment, but former writer Simon Rich has discovered it’s not quite as intense as the Olympics.
Rich was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers on Tuesday, where he shared that he recently attended the Paris Olympics with fellow former SNL writer John Mulaney.
“The amount of pressure the athletes are under is so intense, it really put writing for SNL into perspective,” Rich told Meyers.
“We would always complain how nerve-wracking it was to sit under the bleachers next to Lorne Michaels while our sketch was happening,” he explained. “But Lorne was never like ‘Go out there and do a backflip. Go swim in a cholera-infected river at world-record pace.’”
Mulaney might agree. He guested on Late Night on Monday, where he riffed on SNL’s supposedly “high-stakes” environment as he introduced a fake scene from the upcoming Saturday Night biopic.
“I worked for five years at Saturday Night Live, but I had no idea the kind of pressure cooker that it was,” Mulaney told Meyers. “Apparently it’s high-stakes.”
While Rich says he won’t be competing in the Olympic Games anytime soon, his new book lives somewhat in that world of competition. Glory Days: Stories is a collection of short stories that follow “perennial winners who have begun to lose,” like an aging Super Mario and a Goliath being overtaken by David.
Rich has authored seven short story collections and two novels, but he’s also a prolific television writer. He wrote for SNL from 2007 to 2011, frequently collaborating with Mulaney. He has returned to the show as a writer all five times Mulaney has hosted, too.
Mulaney seems to have returned the favor by lending his voice to the audiobook version of Glory Days. Both the print and audio editions are available now.
