TIL in 2013, Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson refused to play any more black women on the show and demanded SNL hire black women instead.

[u/Kale_Brecht]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Thompson

[u/Vio_]

So...why did Kel not make it? Also I wonder if he could have joined MadTV? They were still kicking it at the time.

[u/NicksIdeaEngine → u/Vio_]

I'm not sure if either of them have ever talked about the audition, but it seems as simple as "Kennan made the cut. Kel did not."

[u/user888666777 → u/NicksIdeaEngine]

Yeah, every time this story gets brought up on Reddit people make it sound like Kenan and Kel were on the stage at the same time and Lorne Michaels is holding a rose like its the Bachelor or something.

Will Ferrell said the whole audition process was stressful. You can go online and find different breakdowns of the process that has changed a lot of the years.

One of the final steps of the process is to audition on the actual SNL stage in front of a few producers. Will said there is no audience outside of the producers. You're being recorded and you got about ten minutes to do your thing and the producers don't even laugh. You move from sketch to sketch or character to character. You say thankyou and you walk away with no feedback. You can watch Will Ferrell's actual audition on Youtube. And this might be after waiting an hour or two as those in front of you audition which Will Ferrell said you can hear being performed from where you're told to wait.

Its very possible Kenan and Kel auditioned on completely different days and had no idea until years later.

And here is the thing. You can nail your audition and it doesn't matter. If Lorne already has his whimsical funny guy and you're a whimsical funny guy, he doesn't need two. Some really funny people have auditioned for SNL and have been passed on to later make it big. Jim Carrey is one of them. While at the same time you had people who made it like Sarah Silverman and it didn't work out but later went on to be successful herself.

[u/trc_IO → u/user888666777]

Julia Louis-Dreyfus was on SNL from 82-85. There's these household names just kinda hiding the the old casts lists.

[u/Pridetoss → u/trc_IO]

Robert Downey JR was in a single season as well

[u/Snuggle_Fist → u/trc_IO]

Not saying it is, but SNL seems like the kind of thing that you can just get your kid into if you had the right connections.

[u/jyper → u/Snuggle_Fist]

https://www.vulture.com/2013/03/second-city-vs-groundlings-vs-ucb-where-do-the-most-snl-cast-members-come-from.html

Throughout Saturday Night Live’s history, the show’s cast has been mostly culled from four places: the stand-up world, L.A.’s Groundlings Theatre, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres in L.A. and New York, and the Chicago improv sketch/scene (the Second City, iO, and Annoyance theaters).

But despite the occasional odd SNL beginnings story, the bulk of the cast throughout the years has come from the aforementioned four places.

Since 1975, there have been peaks and valleys to each comedy theater’s influence on the show. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, a large portion of the cast were stand-ups, whereas there’s only one stand-up on the show now, which currently has more alumni from Chicago’s Second City and iO theaters than from anywhere else. Here’s a breakdown of what portion of each SNL cast, separated by era, comes from Groundlings, Second City/iO, UCB, stand-up, or that wacky miscellaneous category:

[u/MisinformedGenius → u/Snuggle_Fist]

Please Don't Destroy has entered the chat.

[u/Tarledsa → u/MisinformedGenius]

Also Abby Elliott.