Live from New York…Is anyone still laughing?
After bonding over our shared names, and passion for Saturday Night Live, we knew we had to write an article about it. Maddie D, about the TikTok-ification of the New York-based comedy show, and Maddy N, about her personal experience being in the studio itself (and on the standby line). If you are an avid watcher, up for an adventure in NYC, or just know that Harry Styles did a pretty good Sebastian Maniscalco impression, then we think you’ll agree with what we have to say.
What is Going On With SNL?
Madeline Dundon
A girl can only hear about Domingo so many times before she starts to wonder why no one can seem to write anything else. In the past few years, NBC’s Saturday Night Live has received a lot of criticism from younger viewers, as they just do not seem to find it funny. I do not entirely fall into this camp, but as a lifetime SNL fan, I have a couple of ideas as to why many people do.
To quote Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol in Saturday Night, the 2024 film about the 90 minutes leading up to the first episode of SNL, the show began as “A counterculture show starring total unknowns with zero narrative and even less structure”. At its genesis, the show was by all accounts “a mess”. But there sure is something about a group of coked-out, twenty-something-year-old comedians being given 90 minutes of network TV coverage every week that created some pretty good writing.
Lorne Michaels is, by all accounts, a visionary, but Saturday Night Live is a vision he had in 1975. In the past fifty years, a lot has changed. Lorne is no longer newly thirty, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players have long departed Studio 8H, and the show has become a television and comedy powerhouse.
With great ratings comes great responsibility. To be sustainable as a major network television show, there has to be a lot of red tape surrounding what the show can and can not joke about. I have never been an SNL writer, but based on what I saw in the 2025 mini-series: SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, it is not exactly a job without stress. Though I personally think they stopped being funny fairly quickly, I can understand the appeal of writing a third Domingo sketch and knowing it will kill at the table read, instead of risking it with something new.
I think this fear of failure may be, in part, due to the fact that Lorne is no longer a peer to the writers and cast. This is not his fault; he was never going to be able to stop himself from growing up, and running a show for fifty years is naturally going to make you the most influential member of the team. But I think his status as a major fixture of SNL, and of NBC as a whole, probably makes it difficult to test things out around him. This is simply unavoidable, but it does change the tone of the show, which may not be the worst thing in the world.
The other major reason SNL may feel different recently is the TikTok of it all. For better or worse,TikTok has taken over pop culture. So naturally, it is where SNL has turned to find a lot of its recent additions to the cast. This is not necessarily a bad idea. TikTok is home to a ton of very funny sketch comedies and character work (I am looking at you, American High Shorts and Anna Rudegeair).
In the past, the majority of new cast members were sourced from agent submissions, their existing pool of writers, or from local comedy venues such as The Second City in Chicago, and The Groundlings in LA. Comedians who came up through these routes had experience performing for large audiences, or at least had an understanding of the way the show functioned. Among others, legends like Tina Fey and Seth Meyers served as head writers on the show, and others, such as Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell, started at comedy clubs. Modern cast members have also been found in this way. Notably, Featured Player Ashley Padilla also got her start at The Groundlings before joining the cast in 2024.
Sourcing new talent from the internet is not always a bad idea. “Please Don’t Destroy”, aka the SNL comedy trio (started by Ben Marshall, Martin Herlihy, and John Higgins) rose to popularity by posting comedy videos before they were hired to write on SNL. Years later, they are still around. While Higgins has left the show to pursue his own career, Herlihy has remained a writer, and Marshall has joined the cast.
However, not every cast member who came from TikTok is as well-received. Jane Wickline is getting some grief from fans of the show. Though she does have long-form sketch comedy experience from her time on the TikTok live show Stapleview, she is primarily a musical comedian. Her songs are funny enough, but fans have said that they do not feel like she has much use on the show outside of the Weekend Update segment.
This may be the fan in me talking, but I truly believe that this drop in positive reception is simply a bump in the road for the show. Many very funny sketches have aired in the past few seasons, and every episode seems to get a little funnier than the last. But the obvious can not be ignored. Regardless of whether I find an episode funny or not, I am going to tune in for the next one. I am not the person NBC needs to worry about. They need to worry about the teenagers and twenty-somethings tuning in for their favorite celebrity hosts. Failing to do so is what caused the disaster known as season 11, when the show followed their baby boomer audience into middle age instead of catering to the new generation, causing the near cancellation of the show.
When a Stranger Things fan tunes in to see Finn Wolfhard, or a Heated Rivalry fan tunes in to see Connor Storrie, it gives SNL an opportunity to co-op a few of these fans, and turn them into regular viewers. Regular viewers are the number that matters. If people only watch SNL for the guests, the show lacks an identity of its own, and simply becomes another stop on a press tour. This season, this goal seems to be getting accomplished.
The answer to why SNL has been flopping recently, is that it has not been. It is natural that people will always remember the gems of a season and forget the rest, but every season has both. SNL was not created with the knowledge that every skit would be on the internet to be dissected. TV shows are meant to be seen as a whole product, and judging one without seeing it how it was meant to be seen is not fair. Sometimes we have to sit through Siegfried And Roy’s Night Of 1000 Tigers. But if we don’t, we never get to see More Cowbell, and that is what makes being a comedy fan worthwhile.
So you Wanna get into Studio 8H?
Maddy Naughton
The story of my SNL Standby experience begins on November 17th, 2025 when it was announced that Ariana Grande would be hosting the Christmas episode on December 20th, with Cher as musical guest. Now if you know me at all you will know that Ariana consistently is at the top of my music wrapped, and Wicked changed my life. You will also know that I lost the Ticketmaster war no less than 4 times for her upcoming Eternal Sunshine Tour. So, knowing I would be home on Long Island with a chance to see her for free, I immediately texted my best friend Alyssa to tell her that we were doing the standby line.
This was a decision I made not truly knowing what it would entail. I have loved SNL since middle school, but my mom always told me it was a lottery system to see it live, which is not entirely wrong either. The SNL Standby process actually starts the Thursday before your show online. To even make it to the line, you need a standby number, and you can attain one by opening this link at 10AM : https://bookings-us.qudini.com/booking-widget/events/B9KIOO7ZIQF#/event/choose
My pro tip? Open the link itself at 10AM, do not refresh the page. I autofilled all of my information into my browser, so once I picked the live show option (you can also reserve a dress rehearsal) I was done!
Armed with nothing more than my sheer determination and a couple of TikToks, I sat in front of my computer on the morning of December 18th, to fight yet another ticket war, this time for standby reservations. My mom, Alyssa and I all tried to get reservations, yet only I got into the site. But just because I got on the site, didn’t mean the war was won. I had to wait until around 6pm to get a follow up email with my Standby numbers : 121 and 122.
Friday:
Now let’s set the scene: It is a freezing December evening, 6 days before Christmas in the world’s busiest city. The most logical place to be? The Long Island Railroad with camping chairs and tote bags full of blankets of course! You must check in outside of NBC Studios between 6 and 7 PM, or else you are sent to the back of line. So once Alyssa and I bundled up and acquired some Raising Canes, we were set for the next 6 hours of our life living on 6th Avenue. We knew our odds were not great: on average around 70 people are let in off of standby per night, sometimes more, sometimes less. Our show was gonna be a good one too, on top of it being the Christmas episode, it was announced Friday morning that it would be Bowen Yang’s exit episode after being a part of the show for nearly 7 years. That meant over 50 people would have to get out of line or not show up for us to have a chance at getting in. But we also had a lot of hope and just a little bit of holiday magic to get us through.
We quickly made friends with those around us in the line, and by hour 2 we felt like we could make it through the whole night. This was around when I got a tap on my shoulder from an SNL employee that Ariana Grande herself had sent soup and hot chocolate down to the line…so much for the snacks I had brought! After a warm and tasty interlude, Alyssa and I both desperately had to pee. You are allowed to get out of line for short periods of time, and NBC is open, so we headed downstairs to their bathroom. If you want a visual look at our night on the line, Sara and Jonaira (whom we met online) made adorable TikToks of their experience, and how they met through standby!
By midnight, we were antsy and anxious; no matter what numbers we got, there was no guarantee of getting into the show until Saturday. But to our shock and absolute surprise, our numbers had gone down 80 people, and my standby card was number 42. We were careful not to get our hopes up as the train took us back to Long Island for the evening.
Now I think this is also a good time for the safety spiel: Alyssa and I are two college-aged girls, alone at early hours in the morning in NYC. If you follow in our footsteps, which I do highly recommend, I implore you to stay vigilant, keep a buddy and always have a parent or trusted person at home with your location.
Saturday:
The only people going into the city on this 8:30 PM train were definitely Alyssa and I. Dressed to the nines with my curls finally cooperating, it looked like I was having the night of my life. On the inside however, I was a mess. The thought that we had done all of this work to not get into the show was not that upsetting, we agreed we had fun and were always up for a side quest. But the opportunity to see my favorite show since middle school with my favorite pop princess turned movie star? I could not let it slip through my fingers. We arrived at the NBC gift shop by 9:45, got checked in, and then the waiting game began. We went through security, then to what I have since dubbed “the staircase of doom and despair” as we were warned to turn off our devices. With a final text to my mom as if I was off to the reaping, I watched as the line slowly moved, and then moved faster, and then I saw the woman with the bracelets. In a very quick turn of events, because as they reminded us, live TV moves fast, I had a bracelet on my wrist and was in the elevator to the 8th floor.
I will not reveal too much of the magic behind Studio 8H; I hope that is something you want to discover for yourself, but I will say that I was giddy with joy the entire night seeing the inner workings of an incredible show and spotting stars like Scarlett Johansson and Aidy Bryant across the studio. The episode itself was absolutely incredible, and the “Dance Class” sketch has been one of the standouts for me of Season 51 as a whole. Do not even get me started on Bowen’s final sketch–the entire studio was in absolute tears.
On an adrenaline high once it was all over, Alyssa and I recapped every moment in the line for merch (because as an audience member, you get a 10% off coupon) and you can bet the crewneck I bought is one of my prized possessions.
Overall: even on a freezing cold night, I would highly recommend the Standby Line to a fan of the show, the host, or anyone looking for a fun sidequest. I have already convinced many of the UBHC Board members to go back with me, if for no other reason than to give Alyssa a break from my antics. And like I mentioned earlier, the experience itself is free. Factoring in the Raising Cane’s, the merch, and the ever more expensive LIRR tickets, I would estimate my total came out to about $110. But the night I had? Priceless.
