Kevin Nealon Says He Was “Forced Out” of ‘SNL’: “The Writing Was on the Wall”

Kevin Nealon is coming clean about his final days at Saturday Night Live. In a new episode of The Daily Beast’s The Last Laugh podcast, the comic said that despite his nine-season run, he never felt “really comfortable or secure” at the iconic sketch show. Nealon went on to reveal that towards the end of his run, SNL boss Lorne Michaels was “looking to clean house,” so he was “forced out” alongside Chris Farley and Adam Sandler. “The writing was on the wall,” Nealon told The Last Laugh host Matt Wilstein. “I knew they probably wouldn’t bring me back if I wanted to.”

When asked about his time at Saturday Night Live (he starred from 1987 to 1995), Nealon said that in the early days, he and his co-stars “were never really confident that the show would last.” Their concerns were unfounded, and in 1991, Nealon was assigned to the Weekend Update desk. “It was fun. It was a lot of work, too,” he told Wilstein of his Weekend Update gig. But even with the promotion (and the increased ratings) Nealon said that it’s difficult to “ever get really comfortable or secure” at SNL. “Getting that job was almost another layer of fear of getting fired,” he explained. “Because, ‘Oh, you’ve got the Weekend Update spot. How long are you going to last in that spot? Are you going to get fired?'”

“Eventually I did three years of that and then I was replaced by Norm Macdonald and left the following year,” Nealon continued. “I had been there for eight seasons at that point and I’d do one more season after that, so nine. I’d had my fill of it.” Nealon explained that he “loved the show,” but by the end of his tenure, he was so “lackadaisical” about his job that he was “going out and doing sketches with food in [his] mouth from the craft service table.”

By the mid-1990s, he felt that it was time to move on. “Also I think the cast had gotten so big and they were looking to clean house,” Nealon told Wilstein. “I was kind of pushed out too. I know [Chris] Farley was kind of fired and [Adam] Sandler that year was fired. I was essentially kind of forced out. I knew they probably wouldn’t bring me back if I wanted to.” Nealon stayed for another season, but “the writing was on the wall,” he explained. “I had been there for a while, they saw all my tricks. And I got it. I really didn’t want to stay any longer. I had my fill of it.”

Listen to Kevin Nealon’s entire interview on The Last Laugh here.

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