It’s been quite some time since “SNL” saw a true derailment due to the cast cracking up, but that’s exactly what happened this week, during a “Beavis and Butt-Head” sketch. Heidi Gardner struggled the hardest and, according to her, that was the case even in dress rehearsals.
In the sketch, which you can watch here, Gardner appears as a NewsNation host who’s moderating a town hall about A.I., with Kenan Thompson playing the expert guest. But, he quickly gets distracted when he sees a man who looks exactly like Beavis (played by host Ryan Gosling) from “Beavis and Butt-Head” over Gardner’s shoulder.
As Gardner turns to ask him to switch seats, she giggles a bit, but manages to hold it together. The thing is, the man is replaced by another, who looks exactly like Butt-Head (played by Mikey Day). This distracts Thompson’s character even more, so he requests another shift. But, when Gardner looked over her shoulder again, she simply lost it.
But for those wondering, no, that moment wasn’t the first time she saw the full costume and prosthetics. She saw them in the dress rehearsal, and she cracked up then too.
“This makes me feel almost even worse and unprofessional,” Gardner said in an interview with Vulture. “When I looked and saw Mikey in the dress rehearsal, I lost it. I was shocked. I’m thinking about it right now and laughing. I recovered and tried to tell myself in between dress and the live show, ‘You can’t laugh like that again.’”
She continued, “I was trying to imagine seeing him in my head so I was prepared for it, but I just couldn’t prepare for what I saw. I really tried.”
According to Gardner, this sketch was Mikey Day’s “white whale,” as he and another writer had been pitching it for years, but it never made it to a dress rehearsal.
Still, Gardner feels guilty for breaking as badly as she did, especially since she knew what was coming.
“I left the stage a little bit in shock. Then the anxiety set in and I was like, ‘Oh my God, was that OK?’” she said. “I had some friends in my dressing room, and they were like, ‘Of course, it was OK.’ So many other writers and cast members came up and said good job. I’m like, ‘What? I actually didn’t do my job.’”
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