Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | News | March 26, 2026
When Ryan Gosling hosts SNL, people are going to break. He’s going to break, the cast is going to break, and if you look closely in the background, there’s probably a statue trying to hold in a laugh. Well, Kevin Nealon doesn’t like it.
The SNL vet took to Twitter this week after Gosling’s recent gig featured the sketch, “Passing Notes,” where the cast members were given entirely different notes than the ones they read in rehearsal. Understandably — and more importantly, purposefully — not a lot of people held it together, and here we are.
“I never broke character on SNL. I knew how much time the writers put into those scripts. You don’t want to be the one who throws it off,” Nealon wrote on Twitter. “Lorne doesn’t like when the cast breaks. Even if the audience laughs, it doesn’t work for the sketch. If I could get through the Chippendales sketch, I could get through anything.”
In fairness, Nealon holding strong during Chris Farley’s Chippendales sketch is a solid argument. Props, but not everyone is made of stone. Jimmy Fallon got a lot of heat for always breaking in the early 2000s, and while that was definitely annoying enough that Seth MacFarlane roasted him on Family Guy, Nealon’s being a little too harsh on Gosling and the new cast.
Case in point, Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler made a digital short for SNL40 called “That’s When You Break” that features cast members from across the decades losing it in the middle of the sketch. Sure enough, there are plenty of folks from Nealon’s class breaking, and not just from Chris Farley. It happens, and I’m gonna be real, way more than I thought. Seth MacFarlane tried to make it seem like Jimmy Fallon thought he was on par with Gilda Radner, but it turns out, comedy sketches make people laugh including the actors in them. What are the odds?
