NEED TO KNOW
Kevin Nealon is opening up about his 1994 firing from the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” desk.
In a recent interview with Obsessed: The Podcast, 72-year-old Nealon told host Matt Wilstein that he learned the details about his firing from the show’s news parody segment via the 2025 biography Lorne, about SNL’s creator and producer, Lorne Michaels.
“I’m just finishing reading that book called Lorne. It’s about Lorne Michaels. And I’m learning what’s happening behind the scenes that I didn’t know about,” the comedian said. “It says in the book that Don Ohlmeyer — who was the head of NBC at the time, who was in and out of rehab — didn’t like me on Weekend Update.”
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Ohlmeyer’s struggles with addiction have been chronicled in the past, including by Variety, which reported on his stay at the Betty Ford Treatment Center in 1996.
“I knew I got taken off of there because [Ohlmeyer] wasn’t happy with me, but I didn’t know until I read the book that one of the reasons was he said I was ‘mushmouth.’ He couldn’t understand some of the things I was saying,” Nealon added.
He continued: “And for someone who, you know, is a partier like him, I think he knows what ‘mushmouth’ is about.”
Nealon added that it was “fine” when he left the Weekend Update desk because he was also juggling writing and appearing in various other sketches in the show.
“It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed doing it for the three years,” Nealon said of serving as the Weekend Update anchor from 1991 to 1994. Nealon remained on Saturday Night Live until 1995.
