Within the fourth episode of Peacock’s docuseries SNL 50: Past Saturday Night time, Damon sat all the way down to reminisce and snort about his quick time on the present. “Yeah I acquired fired. We gonna discuss it,” he stated.
“I felt like I used to be born to be on Saturday Night time Dwell. So I used to be not nervous for the audition,” he stated and added that he’d already labored on crafting characters like Homey D. Clown and others, who would go on to develop into fan favorites on In Dwelling Shade.
Eddie Murphy, who’d lately departed from the present, informed Damon, “Write your individual sketches. In any other case, they’re gonna offer you some Black individuals shit to do, and also you ain’t gonna prefer it.” However as Damon discovered his footing engaged on the sequence, he had a tough time connecting with the writers.
“Hey, give me the ball; I do know what this wants,” he’d say to the writers, attempting to get his personal work on the present. “However they’d shoot my concepts down.”
“Every thing Eddie stated got here true. They began writing me of their sketches,” he stated of the stereotypical roles he was given. He even stated that there have been instances when he’d straight up refuse roles that the writers had created for him. “I am like, ‘Hell no.’ I stated, ‘Hear, my mom’s gonna watch this present. I am unable to do that. I will not do that.'”
Then, 12 episodes into the season, he determined to lean into a special stereotype for a sketch that’s now notorious for all of the mistaken causes. In “Mr. Monopoly,” Damon and Randy Quaid performed cops questioning a suspect (performed by host Griffin Dunne) whose lawyer is actually Mr. Monopoly.
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Damon did the sketch by the e book throughout costume rehearsal however took issues into his personal palms by the point of the dwell taping and went off-script. He performed his character utilizing an “effeminate homosexual man” stereotype. “I believed it was bizarre, however individuals nonetheless laughed,” Griffin Dunne stated of the sketch.
“After which Lorne fired him just about as he walked off the stage,” Griffin recalled. “I snapped. I simply didn’t care. I purposefully did that as a result of I wished him to fireside me,” Damon added. Lorne even stated that firing Damon was “actually, actually laborious, but it surely needed to be achieved.”
And whereas the game-time resolution may’ve destroyed Damon’s profession, it did the full reverse as he went on to co-create and star within the sketch sequence In Dwelling Shade.
Damon completed by saying that he and Lorne have been in good standing, and although he was fired in the midst of Season 11, he was nonetheless invited again to carry out stand-up in that season’s finale. “Lorne is a really forgiving man. And I believe he simply wished to let me know that he believed in me,” he stated.
Watch SNL 50: Past Saturday Night time on Peacock.
