How Stephen Colbert joined SNL despite being rejected during auditions

Stephen Colbert is synonymous with TV comedy. He got his start on The Daily Show, transferred over to The Colbert Report, and has spent the last decade as the host of The Late Show. By any measure, that's an incredibly successful career.

Colbert's success is what makes his initial failure so fascinating. The comedian auditioned for Saturday Night Live back in the 1990s, but was promptly rejected by creator Lorne Michaels. The story goes that Colbert was urged to audition after SNL producer Robert Smigel saw him perform with Second City.

Stephen Colbert auditioned for SNL in the 1990s

Second City, of course, was the improv comedy troupe based out of Chicago. Colbert impressed Smigel so much that he agreed to audition for Saturday Night Live. Like we already stated, though, Michaels failed to see the magic.

Oddly enough, Stephen Colbert wound up becoming a part of the SNL family a couple years later. Smigel enlisted the comedian's help on various sketches, and he became a freelance writer for the show in the late 90s. Colbert and Smigel were responsible for The Ambiguously Gay Duo sketch that became a fan favorite on the show.

Colbert eventually became a freelance SNL writer

Colbert actually provided the voice of one half of the duo, Ace, while Gary was voiced by his Second City buddy Steve Carell. The future talk show host wrote 13 Ambiguously Gay Duo sketches between 1996 and 2011, and it was nearly turned into a live-action film in 2000.

One of the proposed stars of the film, Jim Carrey, was another comedian who got rejected by SNL before rising to fame. Unfortunately, the film never came to be, and Carrey would go on to act next to Gary himself, Steve Carell, in the blockbuster comedy Bruce Almighty (2003) instead. "We pitched it to Jim. It took a long time [to hear back]," Smigel told EW. "But it sort of died on the vine again."

Regardless of whether he got rejected or not, Stephen Colbert was technically count himself as an important part of Saturday Night Live history. That perceived failure turned out to be a success in the end.