Fred Armisen knows that nobody can ever tell whether he’s joking or not—and he doesn’t quite understand why. Despite being one of the hands-down funniest Saturday Night Live cast members of all time, Armisen can, in fact, be pretty sincere when he wants to be. It’s a trait that shines through on his latest project: a painstakingly produced album of 100 Sound Effects that provides some observational laughs here and there but is generally intended as an accurate document of what the world sounds like in 2025.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Armisen discusses how his obsession with sound helped him become an expert mimic on SNL, whether he was impersonating President Barack Obama or capturing a very specific Californian dialect. He talks about roasting Lorne Michaels during the SNL50 special, whether he could imagine taking over at least part of his former boss’ job, and reacts to the Portlandia memes that have come to epitomize that city’s response to Donald Trump’s threats.
Armisen, 58, has always been fascinated by sounds. He realized he could make his German father and Venezuelan mother laugh at an early age by imitating the accents of people in their Long Island neighborhood. “I was forced to have to discern different sounds, so it’s almost like a lucky thing that happened, that English wasn’t the first language of my parents,” he explains.
Even then, he was making tiny observations about how certain sounds hit his ears—a skill that he has put to use in his comedy career as well as on tracks from his new album like “Supportive Booing at Speech” or “Haunted House Ghost by Nobody Is Home.”
“My hope is that in, I don’t know, 20 years, you could be like, oh, that was the sound of 2025,” he says, hopefully. “You know, that’s what car doors sounded like. Maybe they won’t have car doors in the future.”
Armisen spent over a decade as a working musician, playing drums for both punk bands and the Blue Man Group before he started getting into comedy and the chance to audition for SNL came up. He says it was Mike Myers’ “Sprockets” sketch that first made him feel like his comedic sensibility could even work on such a mainstream show. “It really did feel like an invitation,” he says now. “Sprockets wasn’t just funny. To me, that was a little bit of a like, OK, now we really speak the same language.”
The SNL audition process can be incredibly fraught, but Armisen said the stakes didn’t actually feel that high for him. He wasn’t even nervous—a feeling that would somehow persist throughout what ended up being 11 seasons in the cast. “I was just amazed to even be in the room, because I had spent so much of my time as a drummer in a band that I really actually felt like, I cannot believe I got this far on this whim of an idea to do comedy,” he says.
Many SNL cast members—including Armisen’s frequent collaborator Bill Hader—have spoken out about the intense anxiety they felt for most of their time on the show. There was even a digital short made by Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island at the 50th anniversary show all about how “everyone” in the show’s history struggled in the same way. But not Armisen.
“The whole thing felt like a nice added bonus to my whole life,” he says of his time on the show. “The whole thing felt like that feeling that I had during the audition of, I can’t believe I got this far.”
That extended to his relationship with Lorne Michaels, who Armisen said he was able to be close friends with both during and after his time on the show.
“The theme to our friendship was like, I know what you’re going for. I am so on board, I’m so on the same page with you, and especially when it comes to the music acts,” Armisen says. “One of the first things I talked to him was about the musical guests on the show. So talking about music is what really bonded us.”
There has been much speculation over the past several years about who might succeed the 80-year-old Michaels when the time comes for him to finally leave SNL behind, with Armisen’s cast mates Tina Fey and Seth Meyers as the primary names that get thrown around. By all accounts, Michaels is still the ultimate decider when it comes to musical guest bookings, while talent producer Rebecca Schwartz and coordinating producer Brian Siedlecki are actually in the trenches of that process. But might Armisen be interested in taking over that part of the job?
“Oh, wow,” Armisen says, taking a pause before turning down the hypothetical offer. “I actually think I would be the wrong person,” he explains, “because there are things I probably don’t understand about how music is distributed and what matters. You need someone who is ahead of everybody, someone younger and someone who’d be able to tell me, you don’t understand, this is who should be on.”
“Someone else who really knows who to book should book this when it comes to music,” he concludes. “I have too much baggage.”
But 12 years after leaving the cast, Armisen remains incredibly close to both Michaels and the SNL institution. He hosted the show in 2016 and has made dozens of cameos over the past decade, including as presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Michaels also serves as an executive producer on Portlandia and Armisen’s Documentary Now! series, which he teases will “definitely” have more episodes at some point. “I would really like to do another season soon,” he says.
All of this made him a perfect candidate—along with Vanessa Bayer—to playfully roast Michaels as “Lorne’s Best Friends From Growing Up” during SNL50. The recurring characters, who effusively praise someone while whispering the less-than-positive reality about them, had previously been used to mock dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Bashar al-Assad.
“Colin Jost had the idea for me and Vanessa to do the ‘best friends of so-and-so’ bit and before it’s always been tyrants or dictators or whatever,” Armisen says, giving a subtle laugh to acknowledge what the sketch may or may not have saying about Michaels’ authoritarian rule over SNL. Because the 50th anniversary was ultimately a celebration of the man who created the show in 1975, Michaels was the obvious target.
“The whole thing was for Lorne,” Armisen says admiringly.
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
