The 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live was in February, and with a new documentary last week about the history and cultural legacy of the long-running comedy TV show, the series' momentum in 2015 just keeps picking up steam. The documentary, called Live From New York!, covers SNL creator Lorne Michael’s vision (who is described in the trailer as a “strange Canadian” with a “weird idea”): something between 60 Minutes and Monty Python. Though SNL’s popularity has waxed and waned over the recent years, the show has stood the test of time, bearing witness to wars, presidential elections, catastrophic gaffes, the singular rise of Beyoncé, and more.
A great host can carry SNL, while a boring one can ruin it. It’s not that hosts need tremendous technical prowess to carry en episode, either. SNL is famous for the fact that everyone reads from cue cards, even during the live performance. For example, politicians, journalists and professional athletes have all succeeded in making the audience laugh.
But it does take the ability to laugh at yourself, or at least, commit to laughing at yourself for this one hour and a half in front of a live studio audience. And the stellar hosts are not always the ones you would suspect—Adrien Brody, for example, hosted once and was subsequently banned for life from the show. Justin Timberlake, on the other hand, is practically a regular.
Here are The 20 Best SNL Hosts of All Time.