FRIDAYS AT Saturday Night Live are in some ways harder than Saturdays at Saturday Night Live. Mondays are nerve-racking, sure, with writers sitting on the floor of Lorne Michaels’s office, lobbing ideas at him and the celebrity host of the week during a Socratic pressure cooker of a pitch session. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the most fun (near delirious writing days fueled by snacks and seltzer). But Fridays are when the show has to come together. Writers, cast members, and the production team block out sketches, build sets, choose costumes, rehearse, rewrite, reblock, rechoose costumes, consider camera angles and props, and film pretaped segments, often in a 24-hour workday that involves sleeping in the office, if there’s any sleep at all.
On one of those recent Fridays, when the stage of Studio 8H erupts in manicured chaos—crew members turn piles of wood into elaborate sets and camera operators zoom around on cranes, narrowly missing the heads of performers—Aidy Bryant, a cast member of eight years, is running through jokes for a sketch she cowrote. “The Corporal” stars her and her sometime writing partner, always office wife, Kate McKinnon, as sisters willing to murder each other and their unwittingly hot third sister (that week’s host, Jennifer Lopez) to win the hand of a visiting suitor. It requires a gilded birdcage big enough to fit a human, two vanities, a rifle, a noose, a martini glass full of pills, a rubber lobster, and a corset that has to fly off J.Lo’s boobs at the exact right beat.
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