At some point, every comedian bombs on stage — even legends like Will Ferrell, John Oliver, Rachel Dratch and Bowen Yang. So, on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” the four of them each recalled their worst bomb, with Ferrell even reliving his through a “Second Chance Theatre” performance.
For those unfamiliar, “Second Chance Theatre” is a “Late Night” bit in which Seth Meyers allows actors to play out a sketch that was cut from “Saturday Night Live,” typically due to it not playing well during dress rehearsal. In this episode, it was a sketch about a “Welcome Back Kotter” superfan who just misses his opportunity to meet Gabe Kaplan, the actor who played Kotter himself.
Said superfan was played by Will Ferrell, and he was joined on stage Wednesday night by Oliver, Yang and Dratch, who played his coworkers (who all really kind of hate him). Following the sketch, the quartet sat down with Seth Meyers for a Q&A, where they each recalled a moment where their humor just didn’t land. For Ferrell, of course, it was this particular sketch.
“They don’t do it as much in movies, but they used to, like, collect room tone, the sound department. And they have everyone get quiet to collect 30 seconds of room tone,” Ferrell explained of how the sketch went over at the time. “You could have collected room tone while we performed the sketch, that’s how quiet it was.”
He joked that the “SNL” audience was always so excited to be at the show, but when he performed this sketch, “in one fell swoop I sucked all the energy out of the building early in the show. So everyone behind me had me to thank.”
For Yang, the “SNL” bomb that came to mind was more recent, when Maya Rudolph returned to host the show. The sketch in question would’ve starred him and Rudolph on a birding expedition, but apparently it “failed miserably” and was met with silence.
When Dratch’s turn came, she recalled trying to play a character called David Mack Wilson, who was a “really annoying child star” hosting his own talk show. According to Dratch, the sketch included Liam Neeson — who Meyers recalled being called “The Nees” by this character — and “it just totally died.”
Finally, it came time for Oliver to recall his worst bomb, which did not come from “SNL,” obviously. It came from doing a stand-up set in Edinburgh, Scotland, where an already small audience all left before he finished.
“The entire audience walked out of the first hour-long show I did up there. It was four people in. Two people left after five minutes. It was just left a couple,” Oliver recalled.
“The husband said he was going to the bathroom, and left. An act of unbelievable cruelty to his wife, who sat there for five minutes and I saw her move her hand slowly towards her bag. And I said ‘Are you leaving?’ And she said, ‘I think I am.’”
You can watch the full “Second Chance Theatre” sketch and the cast’s Q&A with Meyers in the video above.
