The Rejected ‘SNL’ Sketch Sarah Silverman Wrote for Phil Hartman

In PostMortem, Sarah Silverman’s new Netflix special that serves as her meditation on mortality, she divulges with a straight face that “death is really hard for me, and that’s what makes me unique.”  

Even the ing of a simple housefly fills her with dread. The idea that she’d kill a small bug? Really difficult to process, and “almost impossible to make it look like a suicide.” She recently had a problem with too many houseflies buzzing her bedroom, and her partner, comedian Rory Albanese, offered to get rid of them. She reluctantly agreed, even though she knew the insects would be goners. 

Silverman left the room and closed the door, listening to the sounds of Rory smacking them with some manner of swatter. Then, ever the considerate boyfriend, he opened a window and yelled loud enough for Silverman to hear, “Bye, guys! Fly safe!”

The episode reminded Silverman of a fun fact: Houseflies only live for 24 hours. It’s a bit of trivia that she learned in the 1990s, “something beautiful and heartbreaking and poetic, like a whole lifetime in a day.” 

Silverman ed that she turned that trivia tidbit into a sketch when Phil Hartman’s last year,” she ed. “Not of life, but at the show.”

Hartman was so nice, she recalled, and suggested that the young performer write a sketch for the two of them to perform together on SNL. Silverman put pen to paper and wrote a bit based on flies and their abbreviated lifespans. In the sketch, Hartman is an elderly fly on his deathbed, an ancient twenty-three-and-a-half-hours old. Silverman was a young whippersnapper, wings freshly sprouted, and Hartman shared his lifetime of experiences in the fly world. “I noon!”

The sketch ended with a dog taking a shit. Elderly fly Hartman encouraged young Silverman to “Go get it, kid!”

Unsurprisingly, says Silverman, the sketch didn’t make it to air. (According to her memoir, The Bedwetter, she never wrote a sketch that made it past dress rehearsal.)

That memory must sting, but Albanese added insult to the decades-old injury with an innocent question. “Are you sure flies only live 24 hours?”

The very idea made Silverman furious. “Why don’t you go look it up? I’m just a girl — I probably dreamt it!”

Albanese backed down, not wanting to start a war over bug trivia. Silverman had won the battle.

“But I did end up looking it up,” she confessed. “They live about a month.”