John Mulaney has a lot of stories about “Saturday Night Live,” from auditioning alongside Donald Glover to going to a Chicago Cubs game with Lorne Michaels, but a new video boils down every anecdote you ever wanted to know in just over 10 minutes.
Mulaney, a former SNL writer, sat down for “Stories From the Show” in a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday, rattling off his entire experience with the show and his favorite memories from Studio 6H dating all the way back to 2008 when he first got a call from his agent at Endeavor to audition.
“The thing is, once you work here, you always work here. There’s great comfort in being here and working for someone who you respect,” Mulaney said in the video. Looking back, he even left some advice to anyone working there now. “Stay one year longer than you think you should…Was all that unusable?”
Mulaney said that back in 2008 when he got the chance to audition, he performed four minutes of stand-up and even got some laughs from the crowd, even after hearing that they never laugh. Mulaney auditioned in a class that included Nick Kroll, Ellie Kemper, Donald Glover, TJ Miller and Bobby Moynihan, who ended up getting cast on the show. The video even has a brief clip of a young Mulaney dusting off one of his old stand-up routines about his favorite repeating characters on “Law & Order.”
Though Mulaney himself didn’t get to be a cast member, he did get a call from Seth Meyers and was offered a writing job, and he quickly found himself working closely with Bill Hader, Andy Samberg and more.
He also remembered his first time meeting Lorne Michaels, going into his office with just an orange T-shirt. “He said, you’re from Chicago? And I said yeah. He said, well now you’re here,” Mulaney recalls. “And he said, ‘Your family’s in Chicago?’ ‘Yeah, I’m the third of four. I have two older siblings. And he said, ‘I know everything about you.’ I think he meant, I have met your kind many times.”
Mulaney would even later share a trip back to Chicago with Michaels and said it was like visiting the city for the first time, attending a Cubs game at Wrigley field and buying hats (why yes, there’s a photo of them at the game).
Some of the other amusing highlights of the video include Mulaney talking about attending the “SNL 40” special on the day that his sitcom “Mulaney” was ending for good, and what it was like the first time Michaels asked him to host the show.
Check out the full video above: