Steve Martin was never an official SNL cast member (and here's why)

Steve Martin is Saturday Night Live royalty. He hosted the show a staggering 16 times since the 1970s. That's more than anybody not named Alec Baldwin. Martin has also proven to have electric chemistry with SNL cast members.

He linked up with Martin Short and Chevy Chase for the Lorne Michaels-scripted film Three Amigos (1986). He stole the show from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Baby Mama (2007), and he currently stars alongside Short on the series Only Murders In the Building (2021-). He's part of the SNL family, right?

Steve Martin has hosted SNL 16 times since 1976

Well, not exactly. Steve Martin has numerous ties to the beloved sketch show, and is close friends with several of its most prominent cast members, but he was never actually part of the cast himself. Steve Martin was never a member of SNL. It's bizarre, we know, as he's about as close to being one as one can possibly be without, you know, actually being one.

There was a specific reason why Martin wasn't part of the original Saturday Night Live lineup, and its pretty simple: showrunner Lorne Michaels didn't want him. During a 1992 interview with Playboy, the SNL creator recalled feeling as though Martin didn't take his craft seriously enough:

"I stopped Steve Martin from being on the show during the first year because I didn’t take his act seriously. Here was this guy with an arrow on his head and doing balloon animals."

Lorne Michaels refused to add Martin to the cast

Michaels, who remains close with Steve Martin to this day, admits that he was a bit too rigid about who he let onto the show when it first launched. "I was incredibly judgmental about who I would let on the show," he conceded. "[Steve] wasn’t my definition of the show. I wanted to distance us from that — for fear of not being taken seriously."

The irony, of course, is that the public is now pushing for SNL to bring Steve Martin on to portray Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz for the show's 50th season. A full circle punchline, five decades in the making. Now that's comedy.