The SNL50 content machine is in full effect, sometimes to an inescapable degree. Now seen on the Peacock docuseries episode about the show’s audition process, Bobby Moynihan grew up as a superfan and eventually fulfilled a lifelong dream by joining the cast in 2008. Growing up, Moynihan was practically fated to be on SNL, to the point where his mother bought him Dan Aykroyd–minted SNL merchandise. Now, several seasons removed from a nine-year run at 8H, not only does he continue to be proud of his run, but the show still feels like it has a Bobby Moynihan–size hole at its core.
Following Stefon’s departure from the “Weekend Update” desk in 2013, Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle became the segment’s most noteworthy and hilarious commentator. The character also typified the sensibility Moynihan brought to his hit characters — including Anthony Crispino, Snooki, and Riblet — during his tenure: belligerent, wild, and excessively extroverted. As he navigates his post-SNL career, Moynihan deserves credit for the way he subtly steadied the ship as the show transitioned from its most recent Golden Age and through the initial Trump years into its current form. In a recent interview just after the L.A. wildfires, Moynihan reflected on his SNL stint ahead of the big anniversary.
You have this amazing collection of SNL-related autographs you obtained over the years at the show. Could you take me through its origin story?
I grew up loving SNL, and for Christmas one year, my mom got me an SNL baseball jersey. Dan Aykroyd had a clothing line called Roots where he made SNL merchandise for a little while. My mom was very kind and would say things like, “When you get on SNL, you can have everybody sign it!” I got lucky, and for nine years, I had everybody sign this jersey, then I had it framed. It’s everybody: Bruce Springsteen, hundreds of signatures, a lot of former cast members. Paul McCartney’s the only picture I have of anybody signing it. When we were clearing for the fires, this is what I grabbed. [Holds up a huge black bag.] A bag full of SNL — just hundreds of autographs.
Outside of SNL, what were your big sketch influences growing up?
I remember feeling cool when I found out what Mr. Show was. SNL led me to that or The State — Kerri Kenney and Tom Lennon and just those guys, Ken Marino. And then eventually it was the UCB TV show I loved. I was walking down the street one day — I was doing an Off Broadway show after college, going like, I’m going to be an actor onstage! — and I saw the UCB symbol above a door, walked in, bought a ticket, saw the show, and never left. I was just figuring out that sketch comedy exists in other places too, and it can be different.
How did you break into the New York comedy scene, and when did you meet up with Derrick Comedy?
I majored in acting at UConn, graduated, then toured with a Shakespeare company. I loved comedy, but just kind of thought, Oh, I’m going to be a stage actor, I guess, and I wasn’t necessarily too psyched about it. Then I found UCB, and that was it. I literally met Amy Poehler. She gave me a job as a bartender for free classes. A couple months later, she was on SNL.
One of my first UCB classes was with Zach Woods, who was 15 years old and taking the train in from Pennsylvania. I just remember thinking, This kid is amazing! Then meeting some people and having some kid come up to me like, “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? Do you want to come to my apartment and shoot this video?” They were kids from a college, and I asked what they meant. “We make these videos, and we put them online.” That wasn’t a thing back then. I showed up at his house, and we did the “Bro Rape” video. It was Donald Glover and DC Pierson and those guys. About a year later, I’m driving up to do their movie, my car breaks down in Connecticut, and Dan Eckman’s mom had to come pick me up and drive me to Donald Glover’s house. It was a nightmare. I showed up on the set of Mystery Team, and there was a craft-service table. I remember being like, “What is happening? I thought we were going to shoot it like last time?” And they were like, “Yeah, we sold a million T-shirts.” [Laughs.]
That is one of those movies that’s so crazy to me, because everyone went on to be a star.
Kids doing favors. I am extremely lucky to have come up then, and also that’s probably why — because we were all so dedicated and friendly and talented and wanted to do a good job, and I feel like there was a good group of people that really loved making each other laugh, and now they’re all working. There was a turning point in my life where most nights on network television, I could watch any one of my friends, any night of the week.
You brought up “Bro Rape,” so I have to ask: How do you see that now? The internet was in a different place then.
It’s kids learning how to do comedy in a specific moment in time. I hope that the reason why people like it is because it was five or six guys trying to make comedy together, and they had a blast that day, rather than, like, you know, the message of it. I see it and I go We were just fucking around on a Sunday, and now I’m talking about it here.
I hadn’t seen Don probably since the SNL auditions, and then like a year ago, I’m at Descanso Gardens standing next to a pond with my kids, and a little kids’ train goes by, and Donald Glover is on it. I kind of half-waved and went, “Is that … ?” About 15 minutes later, he walked up behind me and was like, “It is you. What’s up, man?” To think about making “Bro Rape,” then cut to: I’m about to do the 50th SNL, and he’s a musical icon and is so brilliant? It’s just nuts.
It’s amazing you were already booking movies before even joining the cast.
I had to turn down a couple things when I got SNL. I’d just auditioned for The Tooth Fairy with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Billy Crystal ended up playing that role.
Your SNL audition is a legendary class. How did that come about?
I was on their radar from UCB, but also I was doing something called the Kings of Improv tour, and I think that got on Mike Shoemaker and Lindsay Shookus’s radar. Then I got a phone call saying, “Hey, would you want to audition? I was like, “Yes, but like, can I have some time?” I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to do it too early.
Then I auditioned, was almost brought in, the writers’ strike happened, I didn’t get it, then I got brought back in months later and auditioned again. I just did a bunch of stuff that I thought was funny, because I was grasping for anything. The first audition was like, “Here are my three characters and my three impressions.” And the second one was … When I was a kid, I would just pull up to people in my car and be like, “Hey, can you roll down the window?” Then I would go, “Do you know how to get to Arbolado Drive?” And they would go, “No, I’m sorry.” I would go, “It’s no problem. All you got to do is you’re going to want to go straight …” And I would just start giving directions for as long as I could until they either interrupted me, drove away, or did whatever. It was just this weird bit I thought was funny. I remember Tina Fey laughing at one point, and thinking immediately, Thank you, Tina. That was very kind of you to laugh that hard.
I saw Lorne in the bathroom afterward, literally at the urinal, and he was like, “You did good. You killed it.” And I remember thinking, Did he just say “killed it”? Just thinking that was a very young term, and thinking, like, I’ll never get another compliment again. [Laughs.]
What other characters or impressions did you do during your audition?
That Mark Payne character I did on my first show, definitely. Some other characters I’m not so proud of. We recently did the 50th-anniversary documentary, and they showed us our auditions, and I was like, “Oh no …” It’s just crazy to watch yourself as a child trying so hard to get something you love. I did Jack Black at a funeral for my impression. Oh, and Johnny Cash on sleeping pills, because I don’t do impressions. It was all about the bit itself. I put a stool up, took out a guitar, and said, “This is Johnny Cash on sleeping pills.” I just fell off the stool and snored for like 30 seconds.
Then I literally was like, “This is a guy I just saw on the subway.” I had seen a guy on the subway call somebody an ass hat. So for my second audition, fully improvised, I just went, like, “Hey, how you doing? This is my new product. It’s an ass hat. It’s a half of your ass,” and I made up a fake commercial. I think back now, going like, That was smart, I guess, but what were you thinking? I was too stupid to to realize that I just needed to show them who my authentic self was. I did it by accident, but I was too stupid to realize I was doing it, and I think that was most of my time at SNL.
What’s the backstory of Ass Dan? Did that get workshopped?
There’s no workshopping involved. Mike O’Brien is just a really, really funny individual, and he just wrote that, and we took a picture, and now we’re talking about it on a documentary, and it makes me really happy. One of the best shout-outs ever in real life was when I was walking through Times Square. It was just a crowd of people, and I saw a hand come up and point directly at me out of the crowd and go, “Rest in peace, Ass Dan!” and keep walking. It was great.
How did Drunk Uncle start?
I was writing a different sketch at five in the morning. Colin was like, “Do you have anything? I’ve got to write an ‘Update’ thing.” When you got on SNL, you had to give them a list of your pre-existing characters — just in case you made money off of them, I guess. I wrote down “Drunk Uncle Mike” — I didn’t even know what it meant. I was writing fake character names down, just in case. I said, “I do this drunk thing to make my buddy Chris Gethard laugh all the time. I could be like a drunk uncle, a drunk guy — that guy at your house, everyone has one.” Colin was like, “Great, thanks.” And I remember thinking Well, at least I have that later at the read-through. Then it bombed. Then cut to this. [Holds up a Drunk Uncle Funko Pop.] Fifteen-year-old Bobby can’t believe that there’s a Drunk Uncle Funko Pop. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Was there ever talk about a Drunk Uncle movie?
I mean, yes, amongst friends. But never anything serious, no. Two hours of non-sequitur racist jokes is not fun. [Laughs.] Though did I have it planned in my head? Yeah. He was an exterminator, found an alien in a crawl space, and saved the world. It was established at one time that he was an exterminator in real life, and it was going to be just his horrible life with his wife, and the whole movie was his journey to get sober, and he realized that it was never going to happen, but he does save the world.
Was Riblet an in-joke that starts with Che?
My best friend from college, my college roommate, Dan Sharon — whose name I used hundreds of times on SNL — called me up one night after Che started and was like, “This guy sucks. I could do this job.” And I was like, “What?” He, by the way, is an exterminator; that’s where I got that from. I told Che, just because I thought it was so funny. It was so rude and so stupid, and Che was like, “We should do that on the show.” So the whole joke was I was Che’s friend from college, telling him that he sucked.
Are there any characters or impressions that you feel get overlooked as part of your legacy on the show, or characters that didn’t make it on the show that you’ve always kind of lamented getting cut?
Not overlooked — the ones that are remembered are the ones that should have been remembered. I get Anthony Crispino a lot, and I loved writing Snooki with Christine Nangle. Just that time at SNL was very wonderful, so I associate the character with the people I wrote it with, and how fun it was to do it. My favorite character that I did was Janet Peckinpaugh, which I wrote with Bryan Tucker, Rob Klein, and John Solomon. It was just so my wheelhouse; it’s a hat on a hat. It’s very silly and stupid, and it makes me happy.
Out of stuff that didn’t make it, there was one character that I was really bummed didn’t get on. It was a sketch called “Party for Burl.” I was a guy named Burl who was 900 pounds. They had built a suit, a chair with a mound on it, and my head came out of the top of it. The whole thing was I had finally reached my goal weight of 900 pounds. Everyone was like “Congratulations!” and giving me gifts. Jane Lynch was the host and played my wife. It was just very tender. She was like, “You’re doing so good, Burl, thank you. Everyone’s here to see you!” It made no sense — and it made it into the show! But then, in the middle of the meeting, they took the sketch card down and put up a different one that said “Suze Orman.” That had never happened when I was there before.
Jane Lynch just came up to me afterwards and went, “I’m so sorry. Suze’s a friend of mine, so we’re gonna do that one.” And I was like, “You don’t understand. That’s never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever getting a chance of getting on again.” At the time, I was devastated, and now I am so thankful that did not see the light of day.
Were you surprised when “David Pumpkins” became an instant classic?
I was kind of like, Of course. Two or three days after it aired, we got a text from Tom Hanks, and all it was was a screencap of a BuzzFeed quiz, and it said, “Which Tom Hanks Character Are You?” And he got David Pumpkins! I was like, “Sorry!”
How’d you wind up doing a guest spot on Girls?
Not a joke: Josh Gad had a family emergency, or some kind of emergency. I got a call at like 9 p.m. that was like, “Can you be here at five in the morning?” And I was there. I think I saw Josh Gad at every audition for 30 years.
On the voicework end, you grew up with DuckTales and Star Wars. Are you seeking these gigs out, or do they come to you?
DuckTales was purely audition, and I wanted Launchpad. They were like, “Louie?” and I was like, “No! Launchpad!” Then I went to work at SNL, and Beck Bennett was like, “Hey, I just auditioned for Launchpad.” I was like, Fuck, he’s perfect. He is Launchpad. But I got Louie and couldn’t be happier. And I just happened to be lucky that I got cast with a friend from childhood, Ben Schwartz, and meeting Danny Pudi, and my first big movie was with Kate Micucci. We were children, and then we were on DuckTales together. Happy accident.
Star Wars was the opposite. I was a huge fan of Clone Wars, and that was the only time I ever sent an email to my agents, like, “Hey, can you try and get me something on there?” And I got an email back a day or two later from Dave Filoni, and he said, “Let’s find something for you.” Then I got a call for Resistance, but it was called something else. I went in and read with Jim Rash, and it went super well. I remember thinking, I think this is gonna happen! I’m very vocal about it.
Do you consider yourself a voice guy now?
I have done a lot, but when I work with real voiceover people, I realize that I am a guy that was on television that gets to do some voices on cartoons. There are some really, really talented voiceover artists, and I can be loud or vaguely Italian.
You’ve been in a few SNL-affiliated movies. I love how you’re channeling Belushi in Staten Island Summer.
I laugh at Staten Island Summer, because that was like, “Hey, Colin, go make a movie in Staten Island this summer with your friends,” and we did, and it was a blast. I also was a lifeguard for many years, so to spend an entire summer shooting a movie in a bathing suit with no shoes on was fantastic. That dive off that diving board was real.
Sisters and Grown Ups 2 are some other SNL reunion films you pop up in.
I came in at an interesting time. When I started SNL, Amy and Darrell were still there, so I got to work with them a little bit. A lot of behind-the-scenes crew was still there from the beginning. I got to see the transition out of old SNL, like Kristen’s gone and Seth’s era, and see how that changed everything. Then I was there for Leslie Jones and Pete Davidson — that era where it was less about sketch comedy and more about stand-up, Instagram, and who they were casting. [Laughs.] Now they’ve gone back; it’s these amazing sketch performers again. I got to see the tail end, into the transitional period.
Do you wish you had stayed on the show longer than your nine seasons?
Yes, I would have stayed. I would have happily been Kenan if I had the wherewithal, and if I had had children earlier or whatever, to just look Lorne in the face and go, “Hey, man, I’ll stay here forever!” [Laughs.]
That being said, I am glad I am gone. I went back a couple years later to do David Pumpkins and Drunk Uncle, and it was flipping a switch on that hadn’t been turned on in years. I realized what I went through those nine years, and I was like, Whoa. Like, you really realize what it was like and how hard it is to do that show. We’re not firemen, but we’re still working hard.