Donzerly Light: Worst SNL Hosts

We’ve all heard the saying, “every pot has its lid.” Sure, it doesn’t have the same cache that “Shontay, you stay," or "You are NOT the father!” has, but it’s a valuable concept nonetheless. The saying has been applied to thousands of scenarios – everything from finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with to finding the right outfit that says both, “I read a lot of books,” and “Those charges were dropped.”

It also applies to a job that most of us will never have the chance to do and that’s host Saturday Night Live. I would venture to guess that most people probably don’t want to host Saturday Night Live though, which is good because if you take the number of people that don’t want to host Saturday Night Live and triple it, now you’re getting into the territory of how many people aren’t capable of hosting Saturday Night Live.

To be clear, I don’t think hosting Saturday Night Live is the most important job there is. It’s probably not even in the top 100 most important jobs. I would guess that it’s somewhere between “WalMart greeter” and “bathroom attendant” on the list. All three of those jobs are things that have brought us all great joy at times and great sorrow at others. Shout out to the bathroom attendant at Harry Carey’s restaurant in Chicago in the summer of 1998. Sorry for being so weirded out. That’s definitely on me!

But to get back to the pots and lids of it all, usually when someone is bad at hosting Saturday Night Live, it's often because they’re not an actor or comedian. There’s lots of athletes that have hosted that show and did not do a good job. But, how many cast members from Saturday Night Live would do well playing football or riding a bike? Actually, I bet most of them can probably ride a bike, but maybe they wouldn’t be as fast as Lance Armstrong, who hosted the show in 2005. But to be fair, he was on drugs for a lot of the time he was riding his bike and it’s not unheard of for someone on the SNL cast to enjoy a drug or two from time to time.

And what makes a good Saturday Night Live host anyway? I think the most important thing is enthusiasm. If the person hosting wants to host and wants to put on a good show, that’s going to come through in their performance. Being able to read cue cards helps a lot. The ability to not only possess, but also project, joy comes in handy too. These are all big parts of the reason why when SNL inexplicably had D*nald Tr*mp and El*n M*sk host, it was a huge failure both times. I’d rather watch a cat get a root canal than watch those two “people” do anything. And can you imagine what it must have been like to be on the writing staff or on the cast for those two shows? It would be like doing PR for the Catholic Church. Doing your job well just makes you part of the problem!

And it is in that spirit that I give you my list of five of the worst Saturday Night Live hosts that I can recall. I could have made a list of five of the best hosts, but people are always talking about the good hosts. Some of you have forgotten about these goons and we need to fix that.

• Nancy Kerrigan, 1994 – This is a primary example of how being a leader in one field doesn’t mean you’re going to be a leader in another. One could argue that a figure skating performance includes a certain amount of acting and projecting emotions. Maybe Nancy Kerrigan could only do that when she was moving at a high rate of speed. But when she was standing still, the only emotion she projected was, “Haven’t I been through enough?” And to answer that question: Yes, she had been through enough. Getting clubbed by a couple of dumdums was certainly awful, but at least it wasn’t 90 minutes long.

  
  

• Michael Phelps, 2008 – Do you remember those video packages they always show at the Olympics, right before a big race? The ones where they talk about how an athlete has worked their whole life for this moment and they made huge sacrifices and had a laser focus on their goals? Someone in the sports department at NBC had to make about two dozen of those for Michael Phelps during the course of his Olympics career and it never dawned on anyone that maybe someone who worked so hard that it was almost an obsession might not be able to turn it down a few notches to goof around in front of a few million television viewers? It was probably also weird for him to have that many clothes on all at the same time, which couldn’t have helped.

  
  

• Paris Hilton, 2005 – Listen. Paris Hilton got a raw deal back in the day. She’s an entire human being and we treated her like shit. The internet passed around her sex tape. We all talked about how dumb we thought she was. People thought she was stuck up. So why did Saturday Night Live even want her to host the show? I suppose it was because so many people paid so much attention to her, but people pay a lot of attention to toilet paper (just ask the pandemic!), but that doesn’t mean toilet paper should host Saturday Night Live. But I think she’d probably agree that she did not do an exemplary job hosting SNL, although I bet she wouldn’t care for being compared to toilet paper.

  
  

• Andrew Dice Clay, 1990 – I mostly remember this episode because one of the SNL cast members, Nora Dunn, refused to appear on the show the week that Andrew Dice Clay hosted because she found the material in his stand-up act to be misogynistic. I was still pretty young back then, but even then it made the show way less fun to watch, knowing that the host had basically driven one of the cast members away. And that’s the only thing I remember from the whole episode, which is probably a solid indicator of how good an episode it was.

  
  

• January Jones, 2009 – As someone who is an actress, I thought it was really surprising how uncomfortable January Jones seemed to be when she hosted. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that there was someone just off camera with a gun pointed at her, threatening her to stay. I understand that dramatic acting and comedic acting are two different skill sets, but I would bet that it was less awkward when JD Vance got caught with that couch than this episode of TV was. In her defense, there was a whole sketch where she had to play Grace Kelly with chronic flatulence on the set of Rear Window. Can I please see the list of sketch ideas that didn’t make it on air? There must have been some doozies on that list if this one made it through.

Takeaway Quote of the Week

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

-Stuart Smalley/Al Franken speaking at the SNL Host Survivors support group.

Heath Smith is co-host of Fuzzy Memories, the podcast that celebrates the good, the rad and the fugly of the 80s and 90s. He was once asked by a cast member of MTV’s Road Rules if he was from Puerto Rico. In his free time, he enjoys Mariah Carey a normal and healthy amount. For a good time, follow him on Instagram.

Why "Donzerly Light"? Heath says: In elementary school, I thought "donzerly light" was part of the lyrics of the national anthem. I didn't realize that the actual words were "dawn's early light." I just assumed "donzerly" was an old-timey word that meant "majestic" or something like that. My middle school social studies teacher, who thought I was trying to make a joke with “donzerly,” would be 100% irritated by naming my column this way, and that makes it even better.