Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels recently talked about the time a costume designer tried to have them fired from Saturday Night Live.
On a recent episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the two longtime friends and comedians, who worked on the late-night sketch show in the late 1980s, remembered the attempt to fire them and how SNL boss Lorne Michaels cleverly got them out of trouble.
I was just remembering the bit where we got into our first kind of argument with the costume designer. They went to Lorne and they said, ‘Fire these two or I’m leaving.’ And Lorne was like, ‘This is my costume designer. She’s terrific and got all these awards and everything.’
Daniels began
It’s fair to say that O’Brien and Daniels were a bit nervous when they were finally called into Michaels’ office.
We thought we were getting fired. Yeah, and he sat down and we just had this conversation. He said, ‘You gotta stay in here about 20 minutes so she thinks I’m yelling at you.’ And it was terrific.
O’Brien said. Daniels added
He was great. He was like, ‘I have to be here for 20 minutes and you’re in here too. And just so you know, I’m yelling at you right now,’ . But he wasn’t.
O’Brien was similarly impressed by the way Michaels handled the situation, he said
O’Brien explained that he and Daniels technically “didn’t get into a fight” with the costume designer, but they accidentally upset her by checking on some of the “elaborate costumes” they had asked for in one of their sketches.
We went to the place where they were manufacturing [the costumes] just to check on them because we thought that’s what a good writer producer does is check on things. And that, apparently, was us overstepping our bounds, which, okay, I didn’t know. We didn’t know that. We were brand new.
he elaborated
Overall, O’Brien pointed out that they “never got into fights with people or yelled at people” while working at SNL. Daniels then jokingly added, “No, no, no, no. We just ignorantly stepped on toes.”
After their time on Saturday Night Live, Daniels and O’Brien both worked as writers on The Simpsons for several seasons.
O’Brien later launched a successful late-night career hosting shows like NBC’s Late Night and TBS’ Conan, while Daniels went on to co-create a number of popular workplace comedies, including the U.S. version of The Office and Parks and Recreation.
Watch Daniels and O’Brien share their story about fearing for their jobs in the clip above.
Source: EW