Donald Trump Wanted to Improvise on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Which Didn’t Go Well
In addition to trying (and failing) to intimidate Jon Hamm at the after-party, Donald Trump tried (and failed) to improvise while hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 2015. That’s according to former cast member Jon Rudnitsky, whose comments suggest that Trump’s hosting gig didn’t go over much better backstage than it did for those watching at home.
“He had trouble with the sketches, and if a sketch wasn’t complimentary about him — mainly physically — he wasn’t into it,” says Rudnitsky. “He’d go, ‘It’s cute, but no — next.’ He was just onto the next if it wasn’t about how great he was. I’m totally serious. I mean, there were some really funny sketches that he just didn’t get. His sense of humor is definitely skewed.”
Pete Davidson, another “SNL” cast member, has said that Trump “doesn’t really know how to read,” while Taran Killam claims he “struggled to read” his scripts.
“On set, he would be like, ‘I’m going to riff — I’m just going to riff here,’” Rudnitsky continues. “By the way, nobody riffs on ‘SNL.’ Not Will Ferrell, not anybody in the history of ‘SNL’ has ever riffed. There are cue cards there for a reason, it’s live. And he went off on the show, and you can kind of tell when he’s trying to do a thing. You’re like, ‘Eh, you’re not a comedian.’” Well, that’s not much of a surprise.
