Ben Stiller Called Mikey Day an ‘SNL’ All-Time Great. Is He Right?

It’s always heartening to see one comedian big-up another, especially when it’s seemingly unprompted. Though there may be some unknown formal connection between Ben Stiller and this weekend’s Saturday Night Live pretape about a guy who finds an old “home movie” of his kindly-seeming parents carrying on as guests on a Maury Povich-like talk show in the ’90s, it seems like Stiller was simply tickled by the sketch, and decided to mention it online. (Most of his other recent posts are about the Knicks.)

Stiller praises the full cast of the sketch, which includes Andrew Dismukes as the young man looking at old home movies, Mikey Day and Dakota Johnson as both incarnations of his parents, Sarah Sherman as his grandmother, and James Austin Johnson as the talk show host. But he especially shouts out Day, who he calls “an SNL all time great.”

This is such a funny sketch. Everyone in it. And Mikey Day is an SNL all time great. https://t.co/26W1bv1Qba

— Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) January 28, 2024

This may be the first time these words have ever been put together outside of the hardest-core SNL fandom (within which there are pockets of slavish devotion to almost any and every cast member who has provoked so much as a gentle smile from the audience). That’s not because Day is a reviled player on the show – in fact, he’s a ten-year institution at this point. But part of his work on SNL has been as kind of a grinder: He was a writer for three years before joining the on-screen cast in 2016, and is currently one of the longest-tenured cast members on the show. (Only Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che – also writers transplanted to on-screen talent – and stalwart/record-holder Kenan Thompson have been there longer.) It’s basically the exact opposite of Stiller’s own experience on the show, which was short-lived; he did a month at SNL in 1989, and later headlined his own sketch show (The Ben Stiller Show) before becoming a huge comedy star. He clearly knows his stuff.

So is Stiller right? Has everyone been sleeping on Mikey Day?

The answer is complicated. He’s certainly an important figure in the show’s current evolution, though, in part because his work as a cast member embodies part of a major SNL transition. For the show’s first 30 years or so, its biggest stars were often white men (with Eddie Murphy’s supernova charisma in the 1980s almost working as an exception that proved the rule). Plenty of women and minorities did great work on the show and became audience favorites, but the unofficial “main guy” – someone clearly associated with the show in the popular consciousness and often featuring multiple sketches per episode built around them – would be Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, and so on.

Though figures like Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks, and Molly Shannon helped move the needle over the years, it’s arguable that Kristen Wiig became the first lady “main guy” in the mid-to-late 2000s. Since then, while there may not have been a Ferrell-level breakout, the show’s biggest stars have tended to be women: Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant. The white guys in the cast have often felt more like Phil Hartman (all-purpose, do-anything “glue” guy) or Adam Sandler (niche weirdo; Sandler became a huge movie star after SNL but attempts to make him and Farley the main guys fell pretty flat back in Season 20). Day grabbed the glue-guy torch from the similarly gangly, demonstrative Taran Killam – also one of his major collaborators as a writer.

Killam, though, had some traditional recurring bits that put him front-and-center in a lot of sketches. Day appears in a lot of sketches, but doesn’t do a lot of outsized characters. In fact, his most memorable character is one he wrote (and appeared alongside), but did not play: David S. Pumpkins, the vexing haunted-house inhabitant played by Tom Hanks in one of the show’s biggest sketches of past ten years. (Fun fact: Pumpkins has only appeared in two sketches, many years apart, but was conceived as a recurring format; a similar character was first written for Larry David as Kevin Roberts.)

David S. Pumpkins is the most powerful distillation of a sketch format Day seems to favor as a writer (and has plenty of SNL roots that predate him): A character acts weird or ostentatious in a way that other characters – often led by Day himself – attempt to point out, understand, and/or put a lid on. One of the best things about the Pumpkins sketch is that it lets fellow glue-guy Beck Bennett take the role of vexed man pointing out the weirdness, while Day himself gets to dress up as a skeleton and grind through with abandon. A lower-key version of that game informs the “Washington’s Dream” sketch from earlier this season, where George Washington makes a series of promises about committing the United States to an inscrutable inconsistency in weights and measures, while soldiers, including Day, ask incredulous follow-up questions.

These are just two particularly strong examples among many of Day and his frequent co-writer Streeter Seidell working on a near-perfect SNL sketch that takes full advantage of the show’s strengths as a live show, as a mainstream comedy institution, and as a deep bench of comic talent. Of course, casual viewers of the show aren’t aware of who wrote what, something that is either leaked to Reddit groups that discuss the show in minute detail or, occasionally, the subject of a deep-dive on a particularly beloved sketch.

No, casual viewers might know Day mainly for, well, reacting. In countless sketches, he’s been the guy who essentially says, “OK, bud, let’s try to stop the weird thing you’re doing.” In some sketches, that strained politeness attains its own funny rhythm; watch how he repeatedly suggests to Kristen Stewart that she “go ahead and pop that beanie back on” in this college-set sketch, signaling his increasing frustration by refusing to deviate from his buttoned-up request. But he doesn’t have, say, Beck Bennett’s ability to turn these kind of glue-y roles into miniature crises of masculinity. When Day plays less of a straight-man part, like the white-trash weirdo in that Stiller-approved home-videos sketch, he’s funny in the moment but sometimes lacks a certain character-actor conviction that James Austin Johnson or Andrew Dismukes bring to their similar roles. They blur the line between glue-guy and niche weirdo, as Hartman ultimately did. Day plays types more than characters.

Yet there is utility in Day’s on-camera work, to say nothing of his apparently superhuman sketch-writing chops. If some of his sketch acting feels a little predictable after eight seasons — after all, there’s a reason that the most notable thing he’s done outside of Studio 8H is act as the host of Netflix’s Is It Cake? — he proves his worth every time he helps create an insta-viral pop-culture sketch like the reimagining of a gritty Mario Kart. The show relies less on recurring characters these days – which probably means there’s more call for those, like Day, who know the show so well, inside and out. If Stiller’s all-timer pronouncement holds up, it will be a victory for glue-guys everywhere.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.