Rachel Dratch on the Greatest Compliment She Gets to This Day About Debbie Downer 

I started watching Saturday Night Live as a kid during the show’s first season, and I was immediately fascinated by it. That first cast of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players imprinted on me like I was a baby bird, even if some of the sketches went over my head. I watched SNL like I was getting a glimpse of this special club once a week, never imagining I would someday be part of that club myself.

My very first night there was the 25th-­anniversary show, and I was whisked into the small makeup room only to see Dan Aykroyd, Lily Tomlin, and Elvis Costello. That was the first of many “pinch me” moments. I got to meet my comedy idols, watch favorite bands from 30 feet away, and hear Don Pardo say my name every Saturday night—a dream come true! Then there’s the nervous energy of the live show, running to change between scenes, sets being moved at lightning speed.

Throughout all the excitement, the most challenging part of the job was trying to write sketches and come up with characters. You certainly couldn’t predict if a character was going to take off. Some characters were based on people I knew, like the Boston teens, which I wrote with Tina Fey, drawn from my high school experiences growing up in Massachusetts. The Love-ahs were very loosely based on a professor from my college, and Will Ferrell and I wrote those together, trying to gross each other out along the way. One of my favorite yet lesser-­known characters was this Hollywood movie-­producer guy named Abe Scheinwald who should have retired from the biz long ago and was always eating coleslaw. 

But the character I get the most comments on still to this day is Debbie Downer. Everyone seems to know someone like her. I think a Debbie Downer actually lives within me too—I just have a better edit button! Paula Pell and I wrote the first Debbie Downer, set at Disney World, in 2004. As we were writing it we kept making the sad trombone sound as a joke. It was making us laugh so much, we thought, “What if we actually put the trombone sound in the sketch?” It did well at the table read, but still, you can have a good feeling about something right up until the live show, and it still might not make it to air. Something inexplicable can happen at dress rehearsal and things can fall flat, or it can get cut for time. But that particular sketch, with Jimmy Fallon, Fred Armisen, Amy Poehler, Horatio Sanz, and Lindsay Lohan, made it to air and blew up in the best way. It was out of control almost immediately because we all started laughing—which we really try not to do. But something about the zoom-in, every time, with me trying not to laugh ... you could really see the struggle. People often tell me that if they are feeling down they watch that particular scene to cheer them up, and really, there’s no greater compliment.

SNL has been such a huge part of my life since I was a kid. I can still remember so many sketches from those early seasons of the show, so getting the chance to be a part of it is something I may never get over. It really is the dream-come-true job for a comedian. But more than that, at this current moment, it feels good to know that everyone on SNL, both then and now, will be hard at work trying to keep you laughing. —As told to Erin McMullen