Written by 
“I felt like I couldn’t do well in that situation,” Ben Stiller told Howard Stern about his short tenure as a Saturday Night Live featured player. Stiller didn’t stick around long enough to get the promotion to full cast member, but he’s not the only talented comedy star to leave the show without making it to the A-team.
Here are five more SNL featured players who got the boot before they graduated to the main cast…
Tim Robinson
The star of breakout sketch-comedy hit I Think You Should Leave got a few moments to shine on Saturday Night Live, but not enough to earn him a return ticket to the show. In an unusual move, Robinson moved from acting on SNL to join the writers’ room, making him the first and only SNL performer to become a writer after originally being cast solely as a performer.
Robinson later told Seth Meyers that he recycled rejected sketch ideas into material for I Think You Should Leave. “Things that didn’t work on SNL — it was so nice to be able to bring them back and be like, ‘Okay, it is okay.’”
Chloe Troast
Social media went nuts when last year’s featured player Chloe Troast wasn’t brought back for a second season. “I can’t stop thinking about Troast being let go!” bemoaned one Redditor. “This is such a gut punch and has legitimately made me less enthused about this coming season,” wrote another. The decision was surprising given that the polished Troast carried sketches opposite heavy hitters like Timothée Chalamet.
At least she kept her sense of humor about it. “About a month ago, I found out I wouldn’t be returning to my dream job on Saturday Night Live,” Troast said while accepting an award. “Very Gen Z of me to get fired.”
Casey Wilson
Casey Wilson seemed like a perfect fit for SNL — until she found out she wasn’t in the worst way possible. “On CNN, it said Hollywood Reporter had written a story that I was fired for being fat, which is weird because that wasn’t really true,” Wilson told Andy Cohen. “So then SNL called, and they’re like, ‘You have to refute this story within an hour.’ I had no publicist … so basically what they were asking me to say is, ‘Look guys — I was fired for not being funny, not for being fat.’ So I was basically like, ‘I am fat, yes, but I’m also not funny.’”
Robert Smigel
Before Smigel created TV Funhouse for The Dana Carvey Show but after he’d established himself as a star writer on SNL, he was credited as a featured player during Season 17. Smigel rarely got screentime, though he showed up regularly as one of Bill Swerski’s Superfans.
SNL’s loss was Conan O’Brien’s gain, as Smigel went on to create one of comedy’s great enduring characters, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
Sarah Silverman
Unless your name is Eddie Murphy or Pete Davidson, you’re probably not ready for SNL at 22, the age Sarah Silverman was during her one year as a featured player.
“It was a huge defeat for me, but overcoming it, it’s like a broken bone. It heals stronger,” Silverman said on Fox 29 Philadelphia. “I had a cluster of firings like Saturday Night Live. I got fired from a sitcom I was hired for and then I got a real complex about it. I would make sure I still had the job before I’d go in in the morning because I was used to getting fired.”