Bloopers are inevitable when it comes to live television, and Saturday Night Live's gaffes can almost be funnier than the actual sketches when the seasoned cast members can't help but crack up. That's as true as ever in the 2025 TV schedule, but Amy Poehler reflected on an episode with Jason Bateman that had her screaming in fear rather than breaking into laughter on camera. Her story just backs up Bateman's story about his chimpanzee struggles on the series, and both accounts suggest that the situation could have gone much, much, much worse.
Amy Poehler welcomed Ariana Grande to the Good Hang with Amy Poehler podcast, and the Wicked: For Good star asked about a memorable blooper from Poehler's SNL days. The Parks and Rec vet went all the way back to a sketch called "Monkeys Throwing Poop At Celebrities" in Season 30 in 2005 for her choice, and it really seems more traumatic than silly even 20 years later. She shared:
One thing that comes to mind is one time I was doing a sketch. Jason Bateman was the host, and there was a monkey in the sketch. I would say it was a chimpanzee, an animal actor.... I don't like them. It's too stressful for me. It was a young chimpanzee, and I walked past the chimpanzee and it reached out and grabbed me by the wrist and wouldn't let go in the middle of a quick change. I think it was like the blonde hair or my vibe, and I started screaming. Chimpanzees are very strong, and I couldn't get it to let go of me.
If "Monkeys Throwing Poop At Celebrities" featured smaller monkeys, the story might have seemed like a laugh rather than a terrifying memory. If you know anything about chimpanzees (or watched Chimp Crazy on HBO), you've likely heard the stories of chimps viciously attacking humans who believed that they were domesticated and safe to be around.
Luckily, that wasn't the case with the primate that came to SNL, and the sketch wasn't such an on-screen disaster that viewers could tell that Amy Poehler got a scare. Take a look below, or stream the full episode with a Peacock subscription:
The camera cut away before any screaming could be heard, and perhaps the fast pace of filming SNL means that there wasn't time for Poehler to fully react to what happened. She was actually only briefly in the sketch, impersonating Sharon Stone while Seth Meyers was playing Carrot Top and Kenan Thompson was playing Bill Cosby. (Let me reiterate here that it was 2005.) Jason Bateman played the host, Darrell Hammond reprised his role as SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy version of Sean Connery, and Will Forte was the chimpanzee handler.
But according to Bateman in his 2020 monologue when he returned to SNL for the first time since that fateful episode, his incident with the chimp didn't happen until the credits were already rolling. Reflecting on when he got much more than he bargained for when he hosted during his Arrested Development days, Bateman shared:
Now, if the show did that sketch today, they would use a puppet or a kid in a fuzzy suit for safety, but back then, they used a real male adult chimpanzee. This was 2005. Things were loose. Things were so loose that at the end of the show, at good nights, the monkey was allowed to take a bow with us up here. We're all hugging, we're saying goodnights, the credits are rolling. And then the monkey tried to kill me. Truly, I bent down to say 'good job' to the monkey,' being nice. I'm a nice fella, but not the chimp. The chimp unhinges his jaw, he flashes the teeth, and he tries to bite my entire nose off. This is a true story.
Bateman went on to recount that he'd gotten an apology from the chimp, then joked that "the monkey was destroyed later than night" and it was his "choice." While it's a safe bet that the monkey actor was not in fact destroyed after his time on the 30 Rock stage, it is probably the last time any writers got a pitch approved that would require a live chimpanzee.
If you take a look at the monologue, from a distance it initially doesn't look like the animal did all that much, and the goodbyes carried on. But Rachel Dratch's reaction at around the 2:30 mark in the below clip is a giveaway of how scary it really was, no matter how composed Bateman was able to stay. Check it out:
If you want to revisit Jason Bateman's appearances on Saturday Night Live, you can find the Season 30 and Season 46 episodes streaming on Peacock. The chimpanzee story proves that Amy Poehler and Bateman have much more in common than just sharing the SNL stage for his monologue and Poehler guest-starring on Arrested Development, and it's just a good thing that their stories didn't have much more gruesome endings.
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