Pete Davidson revealed what a Saturday Night Live cast member gets paid per show in a new video compilation for New York Magazine, where current and past SNL players shared what they bought with their first paycheck.
Davidson’s first purchase? “I think I bought dinner,” he quipped. “You guys know what they pay us? It’s like three grand an episode.”
The number comes as a bit of a surprise, considering the salaries of the casts of other popular television shows. The highest-earning cast members of Modern Family pulled in $1 million an episode by its final season. The cast of Friends was also paid $1 million an episode by the end of its run, as were the main cast members of Big Bang Theory, who were paid $1 million or more an episode.
Even during the first season of Friends, when cast members made $22,500 an episode, they were still making seven times that of the current SNL cast, if Davidson’s number is accurate.
So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that several of the comedians went for the same non-sexy item with their first SNL paycheck: a couch. “We bought the most uncomfortable West Elm couch of all time,” James Austin Johnson says in the New York Mag video. Seth Meyers also, coincidentally, bought “a really big couch” (with a side of “really big TV”) with his first SNL check. Cheri Oteri also snagged a nice couch, with Sarah Sherman somewhat similarly sharing that she bought “a nice mattress.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus said “I bought a pair of shoes that were out of my budget.” They were $75.
Bowen Yang, for his part, used part of his first check on a pair of Gucci shoes from Saks “across the street” from 30 Rock.
”You don’t make enough money to make big purchases,” Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis, who said he spent his check on rent, explained, echoing Davidson’s big reveal of the smaller-than-expected per-episode salary. Rachel Dratch said she also used her check on getting an apartment: “I mean, that’s so boring, but that’s the real thing.”
