Tuesday night is writing night at Saturday Night Live. So on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, the staff started the evening working on some sketches based on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win that day’s presidential election. As the long night wore on, though, it became more and more apparent that they would need to recalibrate for that week’s show. Once the writers knew that Donald Trump had triumphed in the electoral college and would become the forty-fifth president of the United States, they were scrambling for how to handle the emotion of the country, of their viewers, of their cast. They delayed dealing with the famous SNL “cold open,” which would set the tone for the episode. “There was no way to know what the country will be feeling like on Saturday, let alone Thursday or Friday,” said writer Chris Kelly. Dave Chappelle hosted the show that week, and he took some of the writers aside and told them, “If it feels real, if it feels like something true you want to put out there at this moment, it doesn’t matter if it’s funny. Just trust what you want to put out there.” They started kicking around the idea of having some of the women in the cast address the audience, speak to some of the pain and questions raised by the week and the election results, and maybe also having Kate McKinnon, in her ongoing role portraying Clinton, sing a song. Then on Thursday, November 10, it was… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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