Zach Galifianakis recalls pitching Saturday Night Live ideas for Britney Spears that ‘bombed very badly’

Actor and comedian wrote a joke about singer’s belly button

The Hangover star Zach Galifianakis has reflected on his short stint as a writer on Saturday Night Live, when two of his Britney Spears joke ideas went down terribly.

During a two-week trial run on the US sketch show, Galifianakis’s suggestions “just bombed very badly”, he has now revealed on the Literally! With Rob Lowe podcast.

When Spears hosted an episode in May 2000 just after her album Oops!… I Did It Again was released, Galifianakis came up with a joke about her midriff.

He told Lowe that Spears’s “belly button was always exposed then and I thought she needed to protect it”. So he pitched an idea where a green screen would be used to “shrink” cast member Will Ferrell, who would play a security guard for the singer’s belly button.

“It felt like a tumbleweed went right across the writers’ room table, and a cricket riding it,” he recalled. “I’m not offended that no one liked it. It was probably bad.”

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The comedian had another opportunity to pitch to Spears directly, and that didn’t go very well either. Galifianakis recalled telling the singer his idea, in which she was “being interviewed by Entertainment Tonight. There’s no jokes. And during the middle of the interview you just start bleeding from the mouth”.

Recalling Spears’s response, Galifianakis said: “She looks at me, and then she looks at the ground, and then I looked at the ground, and she looks back up at me, I look at her, and she goes, ‘Yeah, that’s funny.’”

At 18 years old, Spears broke the record in 2000 for being the youngest person in SNL’s history to appear as both host and musical guest in the same episode.

Galifianakis said the writers’ room at SNL was an intimidating environment.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “I was a standup, I had never written sketches to turn in. It was not easy, I don’t know if ‘supportive’ is necessarily the word I would use there. But you’re new there, and in show business, especially as a standup, you get a thick skin.”