Adam Sandler and Chris Farley Were Furious When They Got Fired From ‘SNL’
As every Saturday Night Live season comes to an end, a handful of cast learn they won’t be invited back for another year. For comedians who struggle to make their way into sketches, they can probably read the writing on the wall. But after one season in the mid-1990s, a number of the show’s biggest stars got the ax.
Don Ohlmeyer, the NBC honcho who later pushed for the ouster of Norm Macdonald, first set his sights on Sandler and Farley, according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.
“All the Baby Boomers, Don foremost among them, thought they knew the difference between good SNL and bad SNL,” Michaels said. “I said, ‘Don, it’s generational. For you, a good show is Bill Murray as the lounge singer.’” Critics blasting the show were also Boomers. Michaels tried to keep the critics away from his comedians.
Don't Miss
“Lorne shielded us,” ed Sandler. “He knew it would affect your performance.” Michaels told Sandler to ignore the bad reviews and network criticism, assuring him that he was funny.
But even Michaels couldn’t ignore a New York Magazine article that remains the nastiest story ever written about the show, describing SNL as “a rare portrait of institutional decay — the gargantuan exertion of sweat, blood, fried food and bluff self-denial that yields, for example, a mind-bendingly awful sketch about space aliens and rectal probes.” Michaels described the article as “the death knell” and the story “that killed everything.” A follow-up story quoted NBC chief Warren Littlefield as saying SNL “needs a creative overhaul that may include everything except the show’s live format and its location in New York City.”
Ohlmeyer’s lieutenants, armed with viewer data, were insistent: Farley and Sandler had to go. Michaels finally gave in, though most s describe the comics’ departures as a combination of getting fired and quitting, with their agents pivoting to movie deals once the inevitable became apparent.
“See, I don’t even know if I was fired,” Sandler says in the oral history Live From New York. “I don’t know how it was handled. I just feeling like, ‘Did I quit, or did I get fired? I have no idea.’ But all of a sudden, I wasn’t on the show anymore.”
Sandler told Howard Stern that sorrow fought with rage for both him and Farley. “I was probably sad, covering up the sadness up with being mad, saying, ‘Yeah, fuck you.’ But I when I saw Farley, and he said ‘Me too, they don’t want me either.’ We were both like, ‘Fuck this shit,’” he explained. “We got mad together, pretended we weren’t sad, pretended this was for the best.”
Sandler got the last laugh, returning to host the show in 2019 and singing about getting fired along with Farley. Some choice lyrics:
I was fired
Not rehired
Well, it made me sad and blue
I told my boy Chris Farley I got fired
And he said
‘SANDMAN, THEY FIRED MY ASS TOO!’
I was fired, I was fired
NBC said that I was done
Then I made over $4 billion at the box office
So I guess you could say I won
