Producers have been keeping a tight lid on what’s planned for Saturday Night Live’s big concert event this Friday night, but former cast member Ana Gasteyer just let a key detail slip. SNL50: The Homecoming Concert will see the return of one of the show’s most beloved character duos.
The former SNL cast member divulged the info to Savannah Guthrie on Today this morning. (Gasteyer guested on the show ahead of her turn co-hosting its fourth hour, Today with Jenna & Friends, with Jenna Bush Hager.)
“I know for sure that Bobbi and Marty are doing something in the concert on Friday night [on] Peacock,” she said, before catching herself. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that.”
Bobbi and Marty refer to Bobbi Mohan-Culp and Marty Culp, the stuffy middle school music teachers played by Gasteyer and Will Ferrell, respectively. The husband and wife duo performed oddly strait-laced, deeply uncool versions of modern real-life songs.
In fact, those real songs have kept the sketches from being posted on SNL’s official channels—something Gasteyer noted when Guthrie suggested they watch the whole sketch on air. “They never show them because the rights are too expensive for music,” Gasteyer said, “so I would be delighted if you did.”
Gasteyer and Ferrell portrayed the duo on Saturday Night Live episodes an impressive twenty times between 1996 and 2012. They also performed the characters on SNL’s 25th Anniversary Special in 1999, an SNL Primetime Extra in 2001, and most recently, 2014’s 40th Anniversary Special.
Gasteyer’s slip came after she reminisced about the characters, calling The Culps “by far the most joyful of all the sketches I worked on on SNL.”
“We wrote it with Paula Pell, who is such a genius in her own right, and we would laugh hysterically all night long,” Gasteyer reflected. “We famously would procrastinate for hours and hours and hours, and then we would start writing Bobbi and Marty.”
“Will often was rushing because he was in so many sketches, and that beard and mustache would be just spirit-gummed on. So if you started laughing with him… he couldn’t break… ” she added, mimicking a clenched-jaw Ferrell fighting back laughter. “Which of course would make me laugh even harder.”
Despite knowing her plans for the concert, Gasteyer revealed she’s still not sure what’s in store for her at SNL‘s three-hour primetime special on Sunday. “I have heard rumors of a couple things I might be doing, but I don’t know,” she told Guthrie.
SNL50: The Homecoming Concert streams live on Peacock this Friday, February 14th, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. It will also be shown at select Regal IMAX theaters nationwide. The concert is a precursor to Sunday night’s main event, SNL50: The Anniversary Special.
