In the 50 years that “Saturday Night Live” has poked fun at society, the city of Irvine has gotten special – and sometimes hilarious – attention.
One sketch features a satirical experimental theater performance by students at Woodbridge High School. Another skit teases with awkward attempts by police to offer safety tips to kids at the make-believe Astoria Elementary School. Fictional UC Irvine students made an appearance in a bit just last year.
There’s little mystery about this, however, when you consider all of the former Irvine residents in the SNL ranks. As the iconic show wraps up its 50th season this month, Irvine has at least four reasons to claim credit for some of its success, namely comedians Jon Lovitz, Will Ferrell and Nasim Pedrad, and head writer Chris Kelly – and possibly others who haven’t yet revealed their Irvine links.
Irvine played a big part in their coming of age, they’ve said in interviews through the years, and it has shown on screen.
UC Irvine alumnus Kelly, who belonged to the school’s improv troupe, Live Nude People (with Clothes On), has said “I use what I learned there every day.”
Jon Lovitz
UC Irvine alumnus Lovitz, who grew up in Tarzana, says he originally had hoped to attend UC Berkeley, but “my father worried I’d become a hippie,” so he stayed closer to home. Forty-six years after graduating, he’s glad he did. “It was the perfect school for me,” he recalled in an interview last month with Irvine Standard. “The school was only 10 years old then, with 10,000 students – and just 90 drama majors – so it felt like a private school. I was in 21 plays, which I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anywhere else.”
Lovitz remembers being impressed that UCI’s mascot was an anteater, thinking, “There’s a school with a sense of humor.” Visiting professor Tony Barr, a network TV executive and founder of the Film Actors Workshop, encouraged Lovitz to focus on comedy, and he would later base his favorite character, Master Thespian, in part on another drama professor, William Needles.
Lovitz was an SNL cast member from 1985 to 1990, appearing on the show several times afterward as he went on to act in movies and perform stand-up comedy in theaters and clubs. He says the 50th anniversary special weekend in February this year, with its crowded schedule of parties, was one of the best weekends of his life – “really like coming home.” He plans to perform at the Irvine Improv, which he called his favorite venue, in July.
“It was the perfect school for me … I was in 21 plays, which I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anywhere else.”
Jon Lovitz
Will Ferrell
Ferrell told the Orange County Register that growing up in Irvine made him funny. It was in fourth grade, for instance, he said, that he first learned to make girls laugh by faking walking into a door.
“In safe, master-planned Irvine, there was no drama, so we had to create it in our heads,” he recalled. “My main form of entertainment was cracking my friends up and exploring new ways of being funny. I didn’t have to have the survival mode instinct like other comics, who grew up in tough neighborhoods.”
Ferrell graduated from University High in 1986, after playing soccer, basketball, baseball and football, and serving on the student council. In 2020, he sent a video message to congratulate graduating seniors locked down for the pandemic.
Nasim Pedrad
Irvine native Pedrad, a former University High drama club president, performed on SNL from 2009 to 2014, where she played a hyper high school student, taunting visiting cops. Later, she wrote and starred in the TV show “Chad,” which premiered on TBS. Set in fictional Westpark High School, it was “loosely inspired” on her memories of being an Irvine immigrant teen, Pedrad told the Irvine Standard in 2023. Her sister, Nina, is also a creative star: a TV and film producer and writer who has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
