Wait, fake pitch?

Sometimes you don’t want to give away what you’re going to write because if you give away the joke and it gets a good laugh at pitch then they won’t laugh when it’s at the table because we’re all jaded comedians. So sometimes you fake pitch just to kind of get through it and it’s always fun to see—you’ll go up to somebody and you’re like, “That idea was hilarious,” and they’re like, “That was fake, I’m not doing it.”

And then Tuesday, we stay here all night writing and then yesterday was the read-through. Thursdays is when the musical guest comes in to rehearse so we don’t have to come in until a little bit later. And then we’ll rehearse all day, shoot either a digital short or a commercial parody, and we just kind of rehearse Thursday and Friday. And then Saturday, back in at noon, we do a blocking of every sketch with costumes and make-up and then the dress rehearsal’s at eight and then everything that we hoped for gets cut.

Do you have any all-time favorite sketches?

I have ones that like hold really special places in my heart, like the Beyoncé sketch. I wrote that with John Lutz in my first season, it was like my eighth episode and that was the first time when I realized how crazy the show was—like, on Tuesday I had an idea, we wrote it, and then it wasn’t going to happen because she wanted to concentrate on her songs, and then Justin showed up, and then it was happening, and then the next Monday it was in Entertainment Weekly . That’s crazy. Also, “The Five-Timers Club” sketch from last year where I wrestled Taran in front of Chevy Chase, Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd like every one of my idols. That was a special one.

“Chippendales” was the one where I was like, Oh I want to do that. When I was in high school and super into it—high school or college, I don’t even know—they did a sketch called “How Much Do You Bench?” with Emilio Estevez and Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Jay Mohr, David Spade. They’re all weightlifter guys sitting in chairs and they have really, really tiny fake legs because the whole thing was, they were clearly doing steroids. But my favorite joke in that is that they all have little fake legs and then David Spade just had his real legs.

Do you have a favorite sketch that’s never made it to air?

Forte wrote a sketch called “Finders Keepers” where he was a guy on a beach with a metal detector and he kind of veered off into the parking lot, and then found a car and assumed that he could keep it because he found it with a metal detector. And it was just him fighting with Alec Baldwin about how he wanted to keep his car because of the “finder keepers laws.” And then they sang a song about it and it was really weird and it didn’t make it on and I was upset.

What did you do for your audition for SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels?

For my first audition, I just did a couple of characters. I did this guy Mark Payne that I did a couple times on the show. I’m very wary with impressions—I don’t think I’m very good at impressions, I hate doing them. I did Silent Bob, so I didn’t have to talk, I did Snagglepuss. I did really weird impressions; and I think I did Nathan Lane and Hurley from Lost .

Are we going to see Drunk Uncle this season?

Yeah, I hope so! I have a funny feeling it’ll come back. I don’t know when, but hopefully soon.

What would he say about Saturday’s premiere?

He’d say: “These kids today, they don’t even stay up to watch good TV anymore…they watch everything on their Hulu phones.”

**Any new characters you’re planning to introduce this season?

**Me and Kate McKinnon have been talking about doing these characters, news reporter characters who, the second they cut, start saying awful things not realizing their microphones are on. I really want to try that. Me and Nasim have a sketch that we’ve been trying to get on where we’re jetpack salesmen. And I have a couple other ones—I have a character named Kimono that one of the writers, Bryan Tucker came up with that I’m really excited to try. Just a guy in a kimono—I’m really psyched about it.