“SNL” fans know Mikey Day as the guy who turns up in a bunch of sketches every week, maybe as the father who gets into traffic arguments that require lots of hand gestures and signs or in a longstanding impression of Donald Trump Jr.
Behind the camera, however, Day is increasingly known as someone who can help everyone from Kate McKinnon to Tom Hanks go viral — even if the average viewer of the long-running comedy showcase has no idea of his unique abilities.
Without Day and his writing partner, Streeter Seidell, there would be no David S. Pumpkins, the kooky Halloween figure who even made his way into an animated special at NBC, or Miss Rafferty, the strange woman who is often kidnapped by aliens. Last season, Day helped conceive of a sketch in which he played a man who looked a lot like the famous MTV cartoon figure — and even got “SNL” mainstay Heidi Gardner to crack up on screen.
“It’s crazy where the ideas originate,” says Day, 45 years old, during a recent interview. He has been with “SNL” since 2013, the first three years as a writer. “Sometimes, you can see something on TV that will just spark your idea, or you see a commercial, but oftentimes, I’m not really sure where this stuff comes from.”
Day is trying to broaden his comedy experience. One of his most recent sketches had him getting undressed behind the “Weekend Update” fake-news desk as his character scrambled to rid himself of perceived spider webs. “I haven’t really done this kind of thing, just an all-out physical piece where the laughs are coming from the physicality,” he says. “It was just kind of a forum to just literally go crazy.”
He says “SNL” aficionados are likely to see him return to the show when its next season starts in the fall — putting to rest, hopefully, some of the usual glut of social -media guesswork about which cast members might depart the program during its summer hiatus. “I want to work there for as long as I can,” he says. “I want to work there until it’s sad.”
Day’s on-screen run at the show, however, may have initially come as a surprise . He joined “SNL” in 2013 strictly as a writer, recommended to producers by former cast members — and his former college classmates — Nasim Pedrad and Taran Killiam. After a few years filled with many sketch ideas and a few brief in-show appearances as a bit player, Day received some interesting news from “SNL” executive Lorne Michaels. He was being made co-head writer and a cast member for “Maya & Marty,” a summer-season sketch comedy showcase Michaels was producing around Marty Short and Maya Rudolph. Day didn’t see the opportunity coming.
“It’s very Lorne to casually drop this information,” he says.
He started to stand out quickly. After the “Maya & Marty” run, Day won a slot as a featured cast member of “SNL.” By his fourth episode, he landed a big moment with Seidell when they came up with the now-legendary “David S. Pumpkins” sketch, which features Hanks as a strange character, flanked by dancing skeletons played by Day and Bobby Moynihan, who keeps showing up in a haunted amusement ride.
The skit was inspired by a Disney ride, says Day, the “Tower of Terror” that puts people in a vestibule that keeps opening on scary scenes amid different drops. He remembers it from frequent visits to Disneyland when he was growing up. He also has an obsession “with weird, flashy, stupid suits” which became another of the character’s hallmarks. Hanks, Day recalls, had some questions. “He was a little bit like, ‘Who is this guy exactly?’” but “brought that special magic that only Tom Hanks can bring.”
The best part of that sketch, now a legendary one, is “you don’t know if it’s going to work,” says Day. “There are not really any jokes, you know what I’m saying? It’s just some weird DNA. That fact that it worked with the SNL audience and the studio audience felt like a little victory.”
Day keeps looking for new funny ideas, says Seidell, his primary collaborator. Day is “always trying to invent new moves for himself that the audience hasn’t seen,” he says, and is typically wiling to apply his humor to someone else’s on-screen moment. “He’ll write a showcase sketch for a new cast member and give himself a tiny little part in it. Once he wrote a showcase sketch for a new cast member that he wasn’t even in at all. I can’t think of another instance of that happening.”
Day and Seidell have written about nine different “Miss Rafferty” sketches that star Kate McKinnon as a woman who has been kidnapped by aliens. The scenes usually have McKinnon discussing surprise bodily entanglements she’s had with her captors and have proven popular enough that even Meryl Streep has taken part in one that was shown during the program’s 50th anniversary special this year. “That was another one where I had no ideas if it would work,” says Day.
As for Streep’s participation? Even the writer seems surprised. “Wild.”
One recent success took years to get on the show. Audiences reacted instantly to a sketch last season featuring Day and Ryan Gosling as two men who looked just like Beavis and Butt-head, the two animated MTV characters. And yet, internally, the concept took a long time to get ready for late night.
Day and Seidell tinkered with the concept over what may be as much as five years. Maybe the conversation taking place around the duo needed to be more serious and less shocking. Maybe the set needed to be adjusted. They once tried the sketch when Jonah Hill hosted, but, says Day, “the sketch itself wasn’t there yet.” They tried it once with Oscar Isaac was the guest, but it never even got to dress rehearsal, because the set requirements were too big during a week where there were a lot of sketches. “We were all going to give up on it,” says Day, until Ryan Gosling came for another hosting stint. “He changes our lives every time he hosts,” he adds.
Day says “SNL” keeps challenging him. Each week, he gets to try something different. “You can literally write whatever your brain can come up with,” he says. The show is “just very engineered, it feels like, to my ADD kind of brain.”
But he’s learned not to probe too deeply at the ideas that come up in his mind. “When it works, it just kind of works.”
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