For a Long Runner sketch program like Saturday Night Live, there has been some on-set tensions that occurred at multiple points in the show's lifespan.
- Lorne Michaels had a tense relationship with John Belushi during the latter's entire tenure. Lorne was uninterested in hiring Belushi for the show in the first place, only doing so because Michael O'Donoghue pushed for him. Afterwards, the two clashed due to Lorne having the final say in the show's creative decisions, while Belushi had been used to having creative control at The Second City and National Lampoon Radio. Their problems were exacerbated by Belushi's frequent drug use, which Lorne had little tolerance for, and Lorne came close to firing him several times.
- Chevy Chase was disliked by his costars, particularly when he got famous (it got to the point where everyone hid so they wouldn't have to share an elevator with him). He had a terrible rivalry with Belushi that went back to their days on National Lampoon Radio and by the time he left, he couldn't even get along with Lorne. When he returned to host the show in the third season, Belushi allegedly egged Bill Murray into provoking Chase. This resulted in the two hurling insults at each other, which escalated into a near brawl moments before they went onstage that was broken up by Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Chase's antagonistic behavior towards his coworkers when he hosted in 1985 and 1997 resulted in him being banned from hosting the show.
- In a 2011 interview, Jane Curtin accused Belushi and Aykroyd of being misogynistic "bully boys" who sabotaged sketches by the two female writers, Anne Beatts and Rosie Shuster. Relations were particularly bad with Belushi, who at one point made an offensive remark which provoked such a verbal Unstoppable Rage of epic proportions that Lorne forcefully paired them together in some sketches as punishment. After Lorne told her that he was unable to rein in Belushi, Gilda Radner was used as an intermediary between the two. However, Belushi's wife, Judy Belushi-Pisano, claims that the hostility solely came from Curtin and that Belushi did indeed put an effort into female-written sketches (primarily by Marilyn Miller, the third female writer at the time), while also saving Miller's life at one point. Curtin and Aykroyd were able to reconcile after a few years.
- Murray and Radner had an affair that ended so badly that they couldn't be in the same room together. Tellingly, she only mentions him once in passing in her autobiography. Radner did become close friends with Laraine Newman, although there was a degree of rivalry between them.note
- The first season featured "The Land of Gorch," a series of sketches developed by Jim Henson in the hopes of trying to create puppets to appeal to an older audience. Henson shared agent Bernie Brillstein with Lorne, Belushi and Radner, and the presence of the well-established Muppets was a big factor in NBC greenlighting the show. However, due to Writer's Guild rules, Henson and company couldn't write the sketches, the SNL writers had to, and they hated doing so (former writer Alan Zweibel said that whichever writer drew the shortest straw had to write the sketch). This led to the crew and writers developing a dislike for Henson and company.note Noticeably, the final few "Land of Gorch" sketches are very meta, and have the characters realize that they're not welcome on SNL and try to get in their good graces, but eventually end up in filing cabinets. Henson later said he had no ill will towards anyone on the show, admitting their two styles of comedy just didn't mesh. Radner later guest starred on The Muppet Show, and Muppeteer Frank Oz had a small role alongside Belushi in The Blues Brothers, suggesting that there wasn't as much ill will between the two camps as has often been reported.
- When Jean Doumanian took over as producer in season six, she believed that Charles Rocket would be the next breakout star. This reportedly went to his head and made him difficult to work with. Ultimately, the breakout star was Eddie Murphy, whom Rocket was reportedly scornful, dismissive and envious of. When Murray hosted the show, the only member of the cast he shakes hands with at the end is Murphy, while he noticably ignores Rocket.
- According to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Larry David hated his time on the show, as he was constantly frustrated by his sketches getting rejected, even coming to blows with Dick Ebersol. She also claims that the atmosphere was so tense that James Belushi once threw a chair at a wall.
- The cast didn't gel in Season 11, when Lorne returned as producer and tried to recreate the celebrity-led dynamic Ebersol had used in the previous season. Featured performer Damon Wayans, specifically, felt hemmed in by the show's format. A sketch where Wayans had only one line was disrupted when Wayans chose to play his police officer character as Camp Gay without telling anyone else. Lorne, normally even-tempered if distant, exploded in anger and fired him on the spot, although Wayans got to make guest appearances later in the season.
- Season 15 note was plagued with dramatic behind-the-scenes ego battles, and tensions eventually forced out Nora Dunn (whom, according to Jon Lovitz, no one liked working with by that point anyway; her refusal to appear on the season's penultimate show because Andrew "Dice" Clay was the host was seen as a way of garnering public sympathy by making it appear she was forced off the show for protesting as she knew she wasn't going to be asked to return for the next season). Victoria Jackson has been critical of both Jan Hooks and especially Dunn, who was romantically involved with Lorne at the time. However, Jackson herself reportedly rubbed her co-stars the wrong way, as she was rarely able to come up with her own comedic ideas and often bugged the other cast members for sketch and character concepts she could use. She also reportedly had a habit of proselytizing her Christian beliefs to cast and crew behind the scenes, which alienated some of the more agnostic members such as Al Franken.
- David Spade mentioned a supposed rivalry between him and Rob Schneider:We sort of had a little friction. We got hired together; we were best buddies. But some things happened. I think he didn't put my name on a sketch the first time [and] he didn't tell me about a writers' meeting. So I thought he was trying to get me fired, which was very easy at that point.
- Season 20 note was such a mess that a cover article
in New York magazine from that time about the current show was heavily devoted to the behind-the-scenes clashes that were going on:- Janeane Garofalo's tenure on the show during this season started with great enthusiasm on her part, but only lasted six months before she quit in disgust after feuding with several cast members and writers (including Franken, Adam Sandler and Fred Wolf). She described the experience as the most miserable thing she'd ever been through, and the sexist atmosphere backstage as comparable to a fraternity hazing, remarking that, every time she arrived on set, she'd wonder "okay, who's mad at me today?"
- Chris Elliott later claimed to have blocked out much of his time on the show and expressed envy for Garofalo's having the guts to leave mid-season.
- Laura Kightlinger also had little nice to say about the experience in the writers' room, describing many of them as immature man-children who were obsessed with crude humor and would bitterly argue with each other, comparing it unfavorably to her experience writing for Roseanne (itself not an easygoing job).
- Chris Kattan was not that well liked by Norm Macdonald, Jim Breuer, Will Ferrell or Tracy Morgan:
- Macdonald and Kattan had a very antagonistic relationship. In an interview promoting the new cast, Macdonald questioned Kattan's sexuality and questioned why he was hired, even confessing that he didn't find Kattan funny. In the episode where Macdonald returned, Kattan is noticably absent. Before Kattan went on air, he would reportedly pester and berate Macdonald.
- Breuer has been very critical of Kattan in interviews. Aside from corroborating the claims that Kattan would pester and berate Macdonald before they would go on air, Breuer claims that Kattan would steal sketch ideas from him and the other cast members for the pitch meetings.
- Kattan wrote in his memoir that Lorne was so desperate to sign Amy Heckerling to direct A Night at the Roxbury that he urged Kattan to pursue her romantic advances, which he had previously rejected. He did so and had an affair with Heckerling, who ultimately produced the film. Ferrell didn't speak to Kattan for months afterwards, then confronted him backstage on the show and declared their friendship over.So I got all your messages, but I didn't call you back because I didn't want to talk to you. I don't want to be your friend anymore. I'm going to be professional and still work with you on the show, but that's it.
- Upon learning of the book, Heckerling called Kattan a "nut" and blasted his "idiot book", with one SNL representative declaring, "It did NOT happen".
- Morgan revealed in his memoir that while he considered Ferrell, Colin Quinn and Molly Shannon his friends, he disliked Kattan and Cheri Oteri, saying, "Fuck 'em". It was later revealed in his audiobook that he felt disrespected by both Kattan and Oteri due to their rudeness towards him.I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to SNL, those motherfuckers just felt bad for me. All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Kattan now? Where's Cheri Oteri now? That bitch can't even get arrested.
- Breuer and Adam McKay had a poor relationship. Breuer claims that McKay did not appreciate his sense of humor and frequently rejected sketch ideas that he and Morgan pitched before convincing the executives to fire him from the show. McKay claims that Breuer wasn't as dedicated to the show as some of the other cast and writers at the time due to his various side projects and his firing was a decision made by Lorne that he simply agreed with.
- A relatively minor example, but Tina Fey recounted on her autobiography Bossypants that one time, when trying to help a colleague in writing the show, said colleague "dropped an angry C-bomb" at her in return. Fey initially declined to name the person, but she would eventually reveal that it was Quinn, while adding that they had since made up.
- During his tenure, Jimmy Fallon was at one point more famous for breaking character and laughing during sketches than he was for any impression or character he played. Staying in character is one of the cardinal rules of sketch comedy. Breaking character in small doses can be amusing and charming (think Phil Hartman), but done constantly it's seen as unprofessional, taking all the attention off everyone else and putting it squarely on you. Not only did this not endear him to several castmembers, but Morgan was so furious about it that he threatened Fallon with physical violence if Fallon did it once during one of Morgan's skits. To his credit, Fallon didn't crack during a Morgan sketch, and years later when he found out what a problem it was, he actually said during his host monologue, "I laughed during a lot of sketches and nearly ruined ALL of them".
- Fallon’s habit was so notorious it was actually referenced in other shows. One Mad TV sketch referred to him as “former future movie star” and he is portrayed as being unable to even get through a single line without breaking character, laughing, and shamelessly mugging for the camera. On Family Guy, Peter actually beat him up on live television, all the while calling him out on it, saying he is NOT Carol Burnett, and that he hasn’t earned the right to laugh like she has.
- There have been guest hosts that didn't quite gel with the main cast:
- Richard Pryor disliked Chevy Chase, as evidenced by his appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
- Writer Margaret Oberman wasn't enamored with Lily Tomlin:
I remember being really disappointed when Lily Tomlin hosted. Because we got so few women hosts, and growing up I always thought she was so funny and everything, so it was a little bit of an idolizing thing. And then when she came to the show, she was so condescending to us, especially to me and the other women writers. It was like, you know, "You should really write about something you know about or something from real life". It was one of those kinds of things. It was like, "Oh my God!" And she seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was being so insulting.- Louise Lasser had been arrested on drug charges two weeks before her show in the first season, leaving her an emotional wreck when she got to New York for the show. With SNL and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman as the two most innovative and subversive comedy shows on American TV at the time, this episode should've been a great moment for underground '70s comedy. Instead it became one of the most trying weeks of the show's first season. Hours before showtime, there was still a real concern that Lasser would just ditch the show, and contingency plans were made for the broadcast (allegedly, they were going to have Chase play Lasser's parts wearing a Mary Hartman wig). Michael O'Donoghue recalled that even considering her very real issues, he still wanted to cut off her pigtails and feed them to her (Due to her near-breakdown on air talking about her issues at the end of the episode, that show was never rerunnote )
- Frank Zappa didn't get on with most of the cast due to his anti-drug stance and their liberal drug use. They, in turn, recall him as spending the whole week imperiously bossing the writers around; he made it worse during the actual show by mugging for the camera and more or less lampshading the fact that he was reading all his lines off the cue cards. Tellingly, everyone stands as far away from him during the goodbye (except John Belushi) as they can get and still be on camera.
- The cast hated Milton Berle due to his constant upstaging and mugging. His brand of comedy was also painfully outdated and didn't gel with SNL's more modern style, but Berle refused to change anything about it. Five minutes into his monologue, Bill Murray dropped a large pipe, making a loud noise and disrupting his routine. Shortly after, Berle was told by a producer at the foot of the stage that the monologue was over, which he responded incredulously to and briefly contested. During the audience's applause while transitioning to commercial, he can be seen angrily yelling while the house band looks on nervously.note
- These experiences notwithstanding, Ruth Gordon has been recalled as the guest host who had the worst relationship with the cast and writers. She turned down almost every sketch proposed for her, sometimes understandably (like the one Franken and Davis wrote where she would have apparently dropped dead in the middle of). The minute the camera went off, she walked offstage and out of the building without saying goodbye to anyone.
- Jane Curtin named Walter Matthau as the worst guest host she ever experienced:Curtin: "I had a hard time with Walter Matthau. He came in thinking that it was, 'Hey, come on now. Let's play.' Not knowing that this show was — down to the minute, down to the second — everything had to be precise and he was going, "Come on. Let's play". It was disrespecting our space, and it really pissed me off."
- Played With for Charles Grodin, whose episode carried the premise of Grodin skipping rehearsals and having to ad-lib throughout the night. The performance was so convincing that many still believe Grodin was genuinely banned from the show to this day. The fact that he skipped rehearsals didn't endear himself to the cast either, nor did his straight-laced attitude. Belushi was quoted as saying, "He doesn't smoke dope, he's not one of us".
- Former writer Dave Sheffield described Robert Blake as the worst guest host he ever experienced:My vote for worst host is Robert Blake. He was sitting in a room and a sketch was handed to him by Gary Kroeger, who was a writer-actor—a sketch called "Breezy Philosopher", a one-premise sketch about a lofty teacher who's kind of a biker tough guy, talking about Kierkegaard. Students kept asking questions while he combed his hair, and he’d say, "Hey, I don't know". Blake sat there and read that, with his glasses down his nose, then wadded it up, turned to Kroeger, and said, "I hope you got a tough asshole, pal, 'cause you're going to have to wipe your ass with that one". And he threw it and bounced it off Gary's face.
- Greg Daniels named Judge Reinhold his least favorite host during his time as a writer, claiming that he was more interested in going out around New York than in working with the writers during the week leading up to the show.
- Macaulay Culkin's guest-hosting stint rubbed the cast the wrong way due to his father, Kit, a notorious stage parent. Kit insisted that the episode not use cue cards so he could get news out that his son could memorize large amounts of text in little time. This angered the cast and crew because SNL usually works on sketches up until the last minute (hence the need for cue cards) and they needed to rearrange their entire workflow to accommodate Kit's demands and give cast members enough time to memorize their lines.
- Norm Macdonald, David Spade, and Bob Odenkirk named Steven Seagal as the worst guest host they ever experienced. He refused to go along with the scripted sketches and at one point, he locked himself in his dressing room and wouldn't come out to show his protest of the show rejecting his ideas for what he should star in. What were these sketches? He expressed a desire to appear in Hans and Franz only on the condition that he'd get to beat them up and another where he was a psychologist and Victoria Jackson was to be his patient, a rape victim. Needless to say, these ideas nor his behavior didn't go well with anyone and as a result, he has reportedly actually been banned from SNL for life and has since been named the worst host in the history of the show by many fans and even Lorne Michaels himself.Spade: "He was a little tough. He was actually tough and he was tough to work with. It was hard. He did not want to play along."
- This was so infamous that it came up when Nicolas Cage hosted and the opening bit was him making horrifically inappropriate comments about women. In the bit Lorne explains how offensive the jokes were and Cage has a Heel Realization, worried he would be seen as the worst host ever. Lorne, in his deadpan, says "No, that would be Steven Segal."
- Lorne's willingness to let Andrew "Dice" Clay host in 1990 provoked rebellion within the cast, with arguments during rehearsals and Nora Dunn famously refusing to perform on the same show with him.note
- Jason Alexander admitted that he was frustrated with the show's production process during his hosting stint in 1993, feeling that the week's schedule set by Lorne Michaels was making things harder for the cast and crew than they had to be and left too little time for rehearsal. He's speculated that bringing these concerns up to Michaels is the reason why he has never been asked to return as host, despite his episode being well-received.
- Mike Myers wasn't pleased with the decision to have Nancy Kerrigan host the show in 1994, feeling that it was a blatant Ratings Stunt meant to piggyback off the media storm surrounding her assault and that her acting skills were subpar.
- Neither of Donald Trump's guest host stints (2004 and 2015) were great experiences for the cast and crew. The main issue both times was Trump not having much in the way of a sense of humor and not really giving the writers any help in coming up with material for him, with Seth Meyers recalling that when he participated in one of Trump's sketches in the 2004 appearance, Trump constantly made it known to the cast he did not see what was funny about the sketch. 2015 had the added element of political controversy, as it was done after Trump announced his 2016 presidential campaign, with anti-Trump protests in front of 30 Rock all week contributing to the tension. In particular, the sense was that Trump and SNL were just using each other for exposure and neither camp really wanted to be there. The only sketch he showed any enthusiasm for was the Vanessa Bayer/Cecily Strong "Porn Stars" bit.note Since then, Taran Killam and Colin Jost have spoken candidly about how much they hated the episode, Bayer has admitted that she felt uncomfortable working with Trump in the "Porn Stars" sketch, and the show would skewer him throughout his presidency.
- Tina Fey named Paris Hilton as one of her least favourite guest hosts. Hilton refused to do a sketch that mentioned 1 Night in Paris and would not leave her dressing room until the writers agreed to discard the script. Hilton also requested to play a fat Jessica Simpson in a sketch because Hilton hated Simpson.note When Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen were later guests on fellow castmember Seth Meyers's Late Night, the three recalled that the cast also set up a betting pool on whether Hilton would ask anyone a personal question, which Meyers won when Hilton asked him if Rudolph is Italian.note
- Fey also named Paula Abdul as a difficult guest to work with when she made a cameo appearance in the 2005 hosted by Johnny Knoxville. Abdul was supposed to play herself in an American Idol parody sketch, only to demand on set that the sketch be changed to have Amy Poehler play her, with Abdul then appearing to correct her impersonation.
- Bill Hader and Jay Pharoah both named Justin Bieber's 2013 guest host appearance as their worst experience on the show due to his prima-donna behavior.note Hader: "He just was in a bad place... Maybe he's in a better place, but back then he was in a very... it was rough, [...] Everybody's usually on great behavior... Bieber is the only one in my experience... he just seemed like exhausted or just at the end of a rope. I mean, he was just so huge."
- Played With in 2021 when Elon Musk was announced as host in Season 46. He didn't endear himself to anybody when, in what proved to be a poor attempt to be funny on social media, he put out a tweet questioning if the show really went out live, insulting a cast and crew that takes pride in working up the last minute to polish sketches and rundowns. Aidy Bryant, Bowen Yang, and Andrew Dismukes posted social media posts directly and indirectly criticizing Musk being chosen to host the show due to their socio-political beliefsnote and threatened to refuse to work on the episode. Ultimately, though, they all did. Bryant would later say her comments were overblown and Pete Davidson said Musk actually got along well with the cast during the week.
- Sinéad O'Connor's stint as the musical guest was one of the most controversial moments in the show's history. After she ripped up the photo of Pope John Paul II and said "Fight the real enemy!", there was a deafening silence from the audience and an infuriated Lorne Michaels demanded that the "Applause" sign not be used.note The show's host of the week Tim Robbins, himself a devout Catholic, was so disgusted with her that he would not shake O'Connor's hand at the end of the show or even acknowledge her. Furthermore, other hosts mocked her actions: Joe Pesci, a fellow Catholic who hosted the show the following week, held up a taped-up picture of the Pope to the audience's delight and threatened to "give her such a slap" had he'd been hosting the same week as her. Madonna, also raised Catholic, herself held up a picture of Joey Buttafuoco and mimicked her actions.
- Contrary to popular belief, Adrien Brody isn't technically banned from hosting again, but this misconception started because Tina Fey had disliked working with him during his guest host appearance in season 28 (2002-03).
- Not as extreme as some other cases, but Dennis Miller mentioned that during their brief time together on the 11th Season (1985-86), he got along pretty well with Robert Downey Jr., but found Anthony Michael Hall to be rather stand-offish.
