Lorne Michaels Warned Jack Black About the Time Desi Arnaz Nearly Died Hosting ‘SNL’

Hosting Saturday Night Live seems like an incredibly demanding gig, requiring long hours, sleepless nights and quick thinking. But at least hosts get paid a whopping five grand. Which is a lot of money for one week of work, but not a whole lot for starring in a network TV show produced by a guy who makes around $40 million a year.

One of this season’s better episodes was the one hosted by Jack Black. But despite the fact that he’s worshipped by children under 10 years old, Black isn’t exactly a kid himself anymore. Black is currently 55 years old. To put that in perspective, in just four years he’ll be old enough to play Indiana Jones’ dad in The Last Crusade. 

This didn’t stop Black from giving it his all in Studio 8H, as evidenced by his raucous monologue, which found the A Minecraft Movie star belting out a song about his return to the show to the melody of Aerosmith’s “Back in the Saddle,” even running into the studio audience at one point, accompanied by a marching band. 

But Lorne Michaels was a tad worried about the host overdoing it, and offered up an amusing, yet very unhelpful anecdote. “Lorne said the funniest thing,” Black recalled on the most recent episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast. “I don’t think he was trying to be funny, but after the rehearsal, he saw me do the tiger roll and he saw me doing that rockin’ number and he saw me sweating and wheezing, and he said, ‘I just want to tell you a story…’”

Michaels went on to describe how he invited I Love Lucy legend Desi Arnaz to host SNL during its first season. “In the ‘70s, this is the beginning, we had Desi Arnaz on the show,” Michaels told Black. “And he was getting up there, he was in his 70s. And I wanted him on, because I just thought, yes he’s older, but he’s an icon.”

Unfortunately, “Desi was kind of struggling,” but still insisted on performing his signature tune “Babalú,” which was a hit for Arnaz way back in the 1940s.

“And Lorne was a little worried about it. You know, can he still pull it off?” Black explained. “And he was doing it, but (Lorne) could see that he was starting to sweat and really struggle physically while he was Bablu-ing. And he wouldn’t stop.”

When Michaels looked closer at the in-studio monitors, he could see that “Desi’s lips (had) started to turn blue.” Worried that Arnaz was “about to die” Michaels “just pulled the plug on it, and said ‘Go to commercial.’”

Michaels told the same story in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, remarking that Arnaz played the song like he was “30” prompting Michaels to seriously stress that the star was about to “have a coronary” on live TV.

Although, in Desi’s defense, the performance, introduced by Gilda Radner dressed as Lucille Ball, was pretty damn awesome. And even though the show cut away from the performance prematurely, when they returned from commercial, Arnaz continued playing, and paraded through the audience. Michaels concluded that it was a “great show.”

As for Black, he enjoyed the anecdote, until he realized why Michaels was telling it to him. “I was like, ‘Wait a second, are you telling me this story because you’re worried I’m going to die?’” Although Black realizes that Michaels was “just warning me not to go too hard.”  

Thankfully that advice didn’t stick.