Tag: Saturday Night Live

Pete Davidson Returns to SNL With Support From A Sober Star

Comedian John Mulaney joined Davidson during Weekend Update where they joked about mental health, hanging out and watching The Mule.

After a tumultuous 2018 filled with personal and professional challenges due in part to mental health conditions, comedian Pete Davidson returned to Saturday Night Live last weekend, guided by former SNL writer John Mulaney, who is in recovery.

The two appeared together in an interview portion of Weekend Update, where Davidson makes an appearance from time to time to discuss his personal life and sometimes his mental health for laughs.

“As you know, I’ve had a really crazy month and I want to talk about something that really matters to me,” Davidson told Colin Jost.

“Mental health?” Jost asked.

But no—the sketch was about the new Clint Eastwood film The Mule.

Seeing Davidson and Mulaney side by side, Jost remarked that he didn’t know the two hung out together.

“We do, but a lot of time it looks like I’m Pete’s lawyer,” Mulaney said. “For real, I’ve been spending time with Pete to try to show him that you can have a life in comedy that is not insane. A sober, domestic life.”

“And after observing John’s life I publicly threatened suicide,” Davidson retorted. “I know I shouldn’t make that joke, but it’s funny.”

In December, Davidson was cut almost entirely from an episode of SNL because he had missed dress rehearsals, TMZ reported. Davidson reportedly was in his pajamas in his dressing room for most of the show.

Before that taping, Davidson posted a message on Instagram before deleting his account, saying, “I really don’t want to be on this earth anymore. I’m doing my best to stay here for you but i actually don’t know how much longer I can last,” according to Vanity Fair.

That was concerning because Davidson has discussed his suicidal ideations in the past. His former fiancée Adriana Grande was so worried that she stopped by the set, but security refused to let her see Davidson, who had reportedly asked that Grande be kept away.

“I’m downstairs and I’m not going anywhere,” she tweeted to Davidson, before deleting the message.

However, in Saturday’s SNL return, Mulaney didn’t let the suicide comment slide without being acknowledged.

“Pete, look at me, look me in the eye,” he said. “You are loved by many and we are glad you’re okay.”

Mulaney doesn’t often talk about his sobriety, although he has mentioned it occasionally.

“I don’t drink,” he said in his show New in Town, according to Vanity Fair. “I used to drink, then I drank too much and I had to stop. That surprises a lot of audiences because I don’t look like someone who used to do anything.”

View the original article at thefix.com

23 January 2019
SNL's Darrell Hammond Chronicles His Journey To Sobriety In New Doc

“The drinking calmed my nerves and quieted the disturbing images that sprang into my head… when drinking didn’t work, I cut myself,” Hammond reveals in the documentary.

Former Saturday Night Live cast member, master impressionist and current announcer Darrell Hammond detailed his struggles with mental illness and drug and alcohol dependency in his 2011 memoir, God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind Altering Mayhem.

Now, a new documentary follows Hammond as he transforms his experiences into a one-man show. Cracked Up finds Hammond delving deeper into his past to find the humor in his pain, and in doing so, unearths memoirs of abuse as a child that gave root to his dependency and illness.

The documentary – directed by Michelle Esrick, and co-produced by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker of The War Room fame – provides plenty of examples of Hammond’s self-effacing humor – in a stand-up performance, he recounts the story of drinking absinthe in Mexico and a subsequent stay in a south-of-the-border jail which provided him with the title of his memoir – and testimony to his brilliance as an impressionist from SNL producer Lorne Michaels, among others.

Footage of his iconic take on Bill Clinton is also included, but the documentary appears to be less about Hammond’s past accomplishments than his present endeavors, and in particular, the years of treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction.

After four decades of diagnoses, Hammond finally met a mental health professional that pointed to childhood trauma as the root of his issues. But as Steve Higgins – a writer and producer on SNL and the announcer for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon – states in the documentary, Hammond could only recall flashes of these experiences. Through therapy and alternative treatment like meditation, Hammond was able to address his past abuse – which, as he detailed in his memoir, included stabbings, beatings and electric shocks at the hands of his mother – and the self-medicating he previously undertook to subdue those memories.

“I kept a pint of Remy at my desk at work,” he wrote. “The drinking calmed my nerves and quieted the disturbing images that sprang into my head… when drinking didn’t work, I cut myself.” Hammond’s condition worsened over the next decade, culminating in a forced hospitalization in 1998 and cocaine and crack cocaine use in the 2000s. Eventually, he found relief from treatment for his various dependencies and the diagnoses of childhood trauma.

The trailer for “Cracked Up” concludes with Hammond practicing meditation and musing about the meaning of the word “namaste.” The word has many definitions, depending on one’s practice, but a common explanation is, “The divine in me honors the divine in you.” After a pause, he adds, “Do you think there is such a place?”

View the original article at thefix.com

16 November 2018
SNL’s Pete Davidson Realized “It Wasn’t The Weed” In Rehab

“I was sober for 3 months at one point and I was like this f— sucks.”

In a recent interview, Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson expanded on his decision to return to smoking weed after a brief period of sobriety made him realize he was “never sadder.”

The 24-year-old Staten Island native told Howard Stern on Monday (Sept. 24) that he needed rehab to gain control of his marijuana use, but ultimately, could not live without it.

“There was no way I could stop. I was like somebody has to put me in a house where there is literally nothing. I had too much access,” Davidson said. The comedian entered a treatment program in December 2016.

He said in 2017: “I never really did any other drugs, so I was like, ‘I’m gonna try to go to rehab. Maybe that’ll be helpful.’”

But once he was in treatment, he said “it wasn’t the weed.”

“I was sober for 3 months at one point and I was like this f— sucks,” he told Stern. Davidson said in a past interview with Pete Rosenberg that he was “never sadder and everything was just way worse” during this period of abstinence.

But at first, he seemed to enjoy the immediate effects of quitting marijuana. In a since-deleted Instagram post from March 2017, he said, “I quit drugs and am happy and sober for the first time in 8 years. It wasn’t easy but I got a great girl, great friends and I consider myself a lucky man.”

But later he would be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), an explanation for why he feels “depressed all the time.” “This whole year has been a f— nightmare,” he said in September of last year. “This has been the worst year of my life, getting diagnosed with [BPD] and trying to figure out how to learn with this and live with this.”

Davidson has been candid about his marijuana use and how it helps him cope with BPD as well as Crohn’s disease.

“I have Crohn’s disease, so it helps more than you can imagine,” he told Stern. “There was a point where I couldn’t get out of bed. I was 110 pounds.”

He told High Times in a past interview: “I found that the medicines that the doctors were prescribing me, and seeing all these doctors and trying new things, weed would be the only thing that would help me eat.”

View the original article at thefix.com

27 September 2018
Seth Meyers: More Celebrities Should Speak Out About Depression

“We’d be better off if more successful people were honest and shared the fact that depression is something that chases you no matter what your status is.”

Seth Meyers recently appeared on The Van Jones Show where he talked about the difficulties he faced when he debuted on Saturday Night Live and why he feels more celebrities should speak out about their mental health issues.

When Meyers joined SNL, he said he struggled with impostor syndrome, a psychological phenomenon where an individual doubts their talent or skill and are struck with a fear that they may be exposed.

“Ultimately it worked out for me by the time I got behind the [Weekend Update] desk,” Meyers says. “But in the beginning, the things that made Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader so great at that show were not skills that I had. It was hard because you get hired at SNL and you think, if they hired me, they know what they’re doing, I’m going to be great at this. Then you realize, maybe they’re having doubts as well that they screwed this up.”

The SNL environment can be an especially frightening pressure cooker for comedians. Meyers’ former cast mate Bill Hader has also spoken out about the anxiety he felt when doing the show. Hader recently said in a Rolling Stone interview that during his SNL stint, stage fright gave him massive migraines that “were off the charts. I was so nervous all the time and I was smoking like a chimney… I’ve stopped smoking, and I don’t get them so often anymore.”

Appearing on Van Jones in the wake of the high-profile suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, Meyers also spoke out about depression, and why he feels more celebrities should come forward and be open about it.

“I think one of the problems for people who are successful, is they think the last thing anyone wants to hear is them talk about is how they’re depressed,” Meyers says. “Because from the outside people are like, ‘What do you have to be depressed about? You have everything anyone could want.’ I think we’d be better off if more successful people were honest and shared the fact that depression is something that chases you no matter what your status is. It’s a very real thing, and the more you talk about it, the better off you’re going to be.”

View the original article at thefix.com

19 June 2018