The TikTok-ification of ‘Saturday Night Live’
TikTok stars are taking over 30 Rock.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
WHEN will SNL be brave enough to tackle the millennial pause????—Kate
New on ICYMI: If you want to hear me hash out this topic in podcast form, today’s episode is all about SNL’s latest TikTok recruits!
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The first time I ever watched Saturday Night Live was on YouTube. This clip, specifically (although definitely a pre-2013 bootleg version). One of the first-ever viral YouTube videos was, in fact, a Lonely Island music video. While much of SNL predates the internet, its online where it really now lives. Sketches are performed live to a couple million viewers, but once they’re posted online, they can rack up 100 million additional views on TikTok alone.
The show is known as a launching pad for stars ranging from Eddie Murphy to Will Ferrell. But at least three of this year’s new hires are already stars—on TikTok. Taken together, Jeremy Culhane, Veronika Slowikowska, and Ben Marshall already have millions of followers on social media. (The other new hires, Tommy Brennan and Kam Patterson, come from the stand-up comedy scene that has bred SNL cast members for generations.)
Culhane, a staple on platforms like Dropout TV, has over 300,000 followers on TikTok, and first made his way into my heart, specifically, with this video in 2023:
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As for Slowikowska, I actually wrote about her way back when for Embedded as a “tough watch” creator, someone whose comedy is based on the discomfort they can inflict on their audience. This is now a staple of TikTok humor, and Slowikowska has since exploded in popularity. She has one million followers on Instagram—more than even SNL favorite Bowen Yang—thanks, in part, to an extended will-they, won’t-they series with comedy partner Kyle Chase:
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And then there’s Marshall, who SNL viewers will recognize as part of the Please Don’t Destroy sketch group that regularly features in episodes, but who, before being snapped up by SNL, were viral on TikTok in their own right.
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If the internet is changing SNL, it’s first because the internet is changing comedy. Listen to any interview with cast members from 15 years ago and they’ll tell similar anecdotes of coming up with one another in the comedy scene through troupes like Second City or organizations like the Upright Citizens Brigade. But there are geographical and financial barriers to joining those groups that the internet does not have, and today’s rising comedy talent is surfaced by algorithms fueled by user enthusiasm.
Their comedy, then, is more likely to be tailored to what does well online—interactive characters or quick, short scenes. Internet humor is more irreverent and bizarre in general, and it doesn’t entirely overlap with what works for Saturday Night Live. This is why (outside of TikTok, where fans are parasocially cheering for their favorite creators making it big) the reaction to some of these new hires has been…mixed.
“i have seen approx 20 tiktoks from new snl cast members on the tl recently and not a single one has even made me crack a smile,” read one tweet. Slowikowska, a sort of female Tim Robinson, in particular seems to be mystifying people. Robinson himself appeared only for one season as a Saturday Night Live cast member. That humor is not for everyone—but neither is SNL.
People have complained for probably its whole history that Saturday Night Live isn’t as good as it used to be. That’s not my complaint. I think Saturday Night Live hasn’t been as good as it can be, and it’s precisely because of the hamfisted way it reluctantly integrates the internet into its comedy.
Despite social media being a crucial platform for its distribution, if TikTok or social media does come up in SNL sketches, it’s often as the butt of a joke.
This tactic others the internet as some kind of spectacle the show doesn’t participate in, rather than the place where their own content establishes its cultural significance. SNL’s most popular videos on TikTok aren’t the ones that call out social media specifically, but are instead short, clippable sketches that users can repackage into trends.
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When the writers do incorporate the internet into their material, the most successful sketches are the ones that engage with it as a reality, like this nod to Pedro Pascal fancams, or this sketch about getting a BeReal notification during a bank robbery:
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Operating off a “yes, we’re all using this” premise is much more relatable than the “only freaks use this” stance that I have to imagine emerges from an age divide within the writers room. Despite the clumsiness that still exists between traditional and internet comedy, I’m excited to see how these new hires bring social media literacy to the stage. I’m also excited to see what happens when TikTok gets to see one of their own in the mainstream limelight, and what that does to SNL’s already gigantic numbers—on social media, at least. There’s not a TikTok star in any universe that could get Gen Z watching cable TV.
The longer it positions the internet/social media as some weird & wacky thing worlds apart from wherever SNL and its viewers reside, the more it feels like "old people being weird about young people," pure and simple. And no one wants to watch that except old people