By the way, it's been pointed out to me that the Saturday Night Live "Five-Timers" club is kind of a scam. It's supposed to be for people who've hosted the show five times but Paul Simon, who is always identified as a member of that elite society, has only hosted four times. He's been on the program many more times than that but not as host.
The performers who've actually hosted the show five times are Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Goodman, Buck Henry, Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase, Christopher Walken, Elliott Gould, Danny DeVito, Drew Barrymore, Justin Timberlake, Candice Bergen and Bill Murray. And I'm told — I haven't checked this — that Timberlake was actually admitted to the Five-Timers Club on his sixth hosting but they pretended it was his fifth.
Wonder if they tried to get all the previous five-time hosts for last Saturday's sketch. Elliott Gould's sheer presence — still hanging around the club after all these years — could have been funny but it also could have been so close to the truth as to be painful. Buck Henry hosted ten times and was one of the most valuable contributors to that show's early success…but he is, alas, not a big, recognizable star these days so SNL has forgotten him. I can't imagine why they wouldn't have tried for the others though.
Years ago when I was friendly with Victoria Jackson and she didn't think I was out to serve Satan and destroy America by not hating Barack Obama, she asked if I had any ideas as to how she could get back on Saturday Night Live at least once. This was some time after she'd left the cast and thought that another appearance on the program would have boosted her visibility and therefore, job offers. I suggested she submit a sketch idea where the host and some members of the then-current cast wander into a corridor of long-unused dressing rooms and find her in one, like she's been there all along, waiting for someone to put her in a sketch and wondering where Phil Hartman was. It would have been like one of those supposed Japanese soldiers who was on an island for years after World War II because no one had told them the war was over.
She liked the premise but I don't know if she ever presented it to anyone there. A year or two later, I was at a party with some current SNL writers and I mentioned it to them. They all laughed and said it was funny but that it was the second-least-likely thing they could imagine Lorne Michaels allowing on the show.
Naturally, I asked what the least-likely thing Michaels would ever allow on the series was. They said, almost in unison, "A current cast member who has grey or no hair."