Doug Abeles

The producer of Weekend Update, which eventually became my job, the producer would take those 500 jokes and kind of cull them down to maybe 150 jokes.

And then the anchor would read through the jokes.

Yeah, it's a lot.

It takes hours, takes them hours to to go through.

And then they sort of just check off the, you know, well, we like this one.

We like this one.

It's all this.

So it's this process of just weeding down through this massive number of jokes until you get to like the last.

20 or so and those jokes then go on saturday they go to um the table on saturday morning where the anchors will come in and look at each joke that's been printed out each of those 20 to 24 jokes and then they'll remove a few more at that point and then we'll take

18 or 20 jokes to the dress rehearsal on Saturday.

There's a full dress rehearsal.

With a live audience.

And that's from 8 to 10 p.m.

And then after that dress rehearsal, yet more jokes are cut from Weekend Update.

You know, the ones that, depending on what got laughs.

i remember please i remember from my days at politically incorrect with bill maher um i was struggling struggling there and as kevin mentioned you you work in these 13-week cycles so when you get near the end of the 13-week cycle you're waiting to hear you know are they going to pick me up are they going to renew me for the next 13-week cycle

And I made it, I wasn't getting a lot on.

I'd get a few jokes on here or there, but not many.

So I made it through the first cycle.

I made it through a second cycle.