How SNL 50 Paid Tribute to Late Saturday Night Live Cast Members

Originally appeared on E! Online

Saturday Night Live is bidding farewell to some of its most beloved cast members.

During SNL 50: The Anniversary Special—a three-hour program marking the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live—the sketch show honored several of its past stars who have died.

Phil Hartman, Norm Macdonald and Chris Farley were among the late comedians recognized in Adam Sandler‘s touching tribute song on the Feb. 16 show, which aired on Peacock and NBC.

While playing guitar on stage, Sandler shouted out how many years various cast members were a part of the show, saying the world got “8 of Hartman ‘The Glue,'” referring to the nickname of the funnyman, who died in 1998 at age 49.

“Six years of our boy Farley, five of our buddy Norm,” Sandler sang. “Fifty years of the best times of our lives.”

Macdonald—who died of acute leukemia in 2021—was also honored during Michael Che‘s “Weekend Update” segment.

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“Since the 40th, we’ve lost the late great Norm Macdonald, who hosted ‘Weekend Update,'” Che shared, “until he was fired for making jokes about OJ Simpson.”

“And he’s obviously one of my heroes,” he continued, before quipping, “so if you’re watching up there, I just want to say, we love you OJ.”

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Adam Sandler's Song: 50 Years <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/SNL50?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#SNL50</a> <a href=”https://t.co/tACkE3xNiJ”>pic.twitter.com/tACkE3xNiJ</a></p>— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) <a href=”https://twitter.com/nbcsnl/status/1891324969415577768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 17, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

In addition to honoring the late cast members, the landmark show reunited several former SNL stars from over the years.

Molly Shannon, Seth Meyers, Adam Sandler, Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, Chris Rock, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudeikis, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell all returned to Rockefeller Center for the occasion, as did Kenan Thompson, the longest-running cast member in history.

Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

And while SNL has been a TV staple for decades, it didn’t start out that way.

“It was a little dinky late-night show,” creator Lorne Michaels told People in 1989. “It wasn’t going to change anything.”

In fact, he admitted that the team was “making it up as we went along, but people seem to have the impression that it sprang full-blown from Zeus’s thigh.”

Season one star Chevy Chase added that the cast only started to recognize the impact of the show when fans called out to them on the streets of New York, quoting the previous night’s most hilarious sketches.

“We were up all night all the time, always working, always on a high, always feeling that we had something new and that people couldn’t wait to see it,” he told the outlet. “We didn’t really know if it was good or not, just that we had plenty of ideas.”

To see which celebrities attended SNL 50: The Anniversary Special, read on.

(E!, SNL, NBC and Peacock are all part of the NBCUniversal family.)

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