Andy Samberg Says ‘Saturday Night Live’ Prepared Him for Raising His Daughter
Saturday Night Live can still be argued as a true breeding ground for new talent, romantic linkups, plus life lessons working in cramped spaces. That’s a lot to say about the small studio 8H in the iconic 30 Rock building. Yet, we don’t hear a lot about the third thing we mentioned, as in SNL preparing cast members for future careers or life decisions.
As comical as Andy Samberg is 150% of the time, we’re finally learning a bit of a serious side to him. Even then, it has a strange comedic twist in relation to him recently having a girl with his wife Joanna Newsom.
It turns out all those late nights working on SNL helped prepare him for fatherhood in an unexpected way. No, it had nothing to do with being a surrogate parent for SNL upstarts.
Samberg seemed a little unprepared for becoming a father
When Samberg did an interview with The New York Times last year for Hotel Transylvania 3, he talked about fatherhood at length and made some hilarious comments about almost regretting it.
Yes, he found out just how tiring the job of having a newborn is. He noted the childbirth moment is always magical, yet quickly descends into the hell of changing diapers and other baby issues in the middle of the a.m. hours.
In other words, he’s been completely exhausted in the last year helping raise his daughter. Doing this while also working on NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine has also likely made him a walking comedic zombie.
Not that doing a filmed sitcom is quite as stressful as preparing a live show every Saturday night. All those late-night hours working on SNL was a good training ground for working on all cylinders with little sleep.
‘SNL‘ can prepare any performer for running on empty
There’s been a lot of stories out of SNL for years from writers and cast members who say the hours spent putting the show together is more than a little intense. Assembling a 90-minute comedy show in only five days involves a lot of all-nighters when it comes to writing sketches and rehearsals to make sure it all works.
As we’ve often seen, not all the sketches do work due to the probable crunch time. Andy Samberg usually did well there, though, particularly when his The Lonely Island production arm started airing their short films.
Putting those bits together in a week no doubt took a lot of scrambling with little sleep time. Thanks to it all, Samberg says it prepped him to know how to keep going while exhausted.
How he and other performers keep their minds clear when operating on this level is a perfect study of running on complete adrenaline.
It’s a wonder Samberg didn’t meet his wife on ‘SNL‘
Considering we’ve written recently about Studio 8H being very much like NBC’s version of Tinder, we almost find it surprising Samberg didn’t link up with Joanna Newsom there. As a musician, Newsom has never appeared on SNL as a musical guest, which proves Samberg truly had a life far away from the studio.
He was simply a fan of her music, and he met her at one of her concerts. Finding love away from the confines of Studio 8H was obviously smarter due to reality there not always be nurtured. A lot of the romances started there are famous, but don’t always have happy endings.
As much as Samberg found ways to cope with lack of sleep, he’s created a smart and more serious family side as his own form of aesthetic distance. The seemingly craziest comedians usually are that way.
