Dane Cook knows he wasn’t the best Saturday Night Live host; in fact, he admits he was sometimes “horrible.”
“I got to feel like I was horrible in a couple of things,” the comedian, who hosted the show in 2005 and again in 2006, said on a recent episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast, which is hosted by former SNL-ers David Spade and Dana Carvey. “I remember just coming off a couple of sketches being like, ‘Whoa, that was bad. I hope the next one’s better because that one…'” he recalled.
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Cook clarified that he fumbled the live broadcast rather than the dress rehearsal. “Oh, something missed the mark,” he remembered thinking at the time.
The Good Luck Chuck star explained that there’s a specific “feeling in your body when you know you’re missing, and you just gotta keep going.”
In a memorable sketch in his first hosting gig, he played a guy who showed up to a holiday party in a turtleneck sweater to impress a woman (Amy Poehler), but the garment was so thick that it restricted his movement and made him super itchy and warm. Also starring Rachel Dratch and Seth Meyers, Cook ends up writhing on the floor in discomfort, only to discover that Poehler’s character is really turned off by turtlenecks. The audience was into it, and Dratch smiled much of the time, which had to mean something.
In another sketch, the comic stood alongside Kristen Wiig as her popular Target Lady character, a recurring bit that always got laughs.
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It was a huge compliment to Cook that he was asked back to host so soon, but really, the fact he made it to SNL at all was huge. Earlier in the podcast episode, he explained that his appearances on the Lorne Michaels-created show came several years after he skipped his own audition to join the cast due to experiencing a panic attack on a bench outside 30 Rock before going inside.
“Just to be able to finally do it, though, after the the bench incident years earlier and to finally be asked to, you know, come on there and host, man,” he acknowledged. “Then to be able to even just share it with you guys, like, I don’t wanna geek out too much, but it’s very cool,” he told Carvey and Spade, sharing that he’d been hooked on SNL since childhood, watching Martin Short play the Ed Grimley character.
“I missed my moment,” Cook said of skipping his audition, “but I got a second chance at, like, being a part of your world in a way.”
The comedian shared that while hosting he did take the chance to tell Michaels about what had happened years earlier since he’d been told that he’d been asked to audition because the show creator was familiar with his work as a stand-up.
“I was on the radar. And so, you know, I reminded him,” Cook said of speaking to the SNL boss about it during his hosting turn. “I probably kept a slot available for you guys that day, because I didn’t come in when you guys wanted me to,” he recalled saying to Michaels. “But he didn’t care too much about that.”
Cook noted that it was an extra treat to have late SNL announcer Don Pardo, who died in 2014, introduce him to the Studio 8H audience.
“Don Pardo was still there for the first time I came through,” the Employee of the Month actor said, “so I got pictures with him in the hall and got to hear him say Dane Cook.”
Listen to Cook’s story on the Fly on the Wall episode above.
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