As of this writing, Jack Black has hosted Saturday Night Live four times and appeared twice as the musical guest as part of the duo Tenacious D. These are huge accomplishments—but given his enormous profile as a film star and music-comedy giant, it’s easy to wonder why he was never hired for the sketch show’s main cast. (The pairing seems obvious, right? Imagine the alternate universe where he and Will Ferrell are trading lines.)
But that missed opportunity wasn’t SNL’s fault. Black simply never auditioned for the show, despite having a bizarre plan in place for how he’d approach it. In a laid-back chat with SNL alumnus Amy Poehler on her Good Hangpodcast, the actor opened up about his hilarious yet aborted concept—and how his own insecurities may have prevented him from taking that potentially life-changing plunge.
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Responding to Poehler’s suggestion that he "could have been a cast member," Black was confident that she’s wrong: "No, I don’t think I could," he said. "I don’t think I could handle it week in and week out. Once every 20 years is more my speed for that gig." (His first hosting spot was January 19, 2002. His most recent was on April 5, 2025.) "I did want to audition, but then I didn’t audition," he said. "I had an idea in mind that I never went and followed through with."
"Well, I don’t want to repeat it because now it really sounds stupid in my mind," he said, almost grimacing at the memory. "My audition was gonna be basically [scoffs]…I was gonna be a superhero that I created. I don’t remember what it was called, but it was like a combination of The Hulk and—maybe it was just The Hulk. I was gonna come in as The Hulk and just jump around do this weird slow-motion performance-art dance where I would crush things with my foot and do a mimed 'the Earth is cracking.' I was not gonna get in, and I knew that, but I had practiced it in my mirror in my living room a few times. But I never pulled the trigger."
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Poehler speculated that her friend may have participated in a little self-sabotage, and Black agreed. "That’s the constant battle: the fear of failure," he said. "Sometimes you’re up for the battle, and sometimes you’re just like, 'Pass.'"
While it’s fun to think about Black on SNL, his career path was obviously just fine without it (in April 2025, Collider reported that his career global box-office total was nearly $10 billion. Not too shabby). Still, for a sample of what that union could have looked like, just consult Tenacious D’s appearance in a May 1998 episode (hosted by Matthew Broderick), in which the duo performed a showcase of "The History of Tenacious D" and "Double Team." (They had to do some notable self-censoring for the latter, a particularly risqué number that wasn’t well-suited for national TV.)
It’s also worth noting that Black did wind up on a classic sketch-comedy show—just not this one. Between 1995 and 1996, he appeared in four early episodes of the subversive and giddily surreal HBO series Mr. Show, created by and starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. In many ways, it was probably a better stylistic fit, as evidenced by the absurdist (and very NSFW) musical sketch where he plays both a farmer and Satan.
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