Saturday Night Nursery
Joe
Tuesday
7:08 pm
Live from New York… it’s a three-year-old! Well, close to it anyways. I’ve been noticing SNL’s featured a lot more youngster hosts this season. And that’s not a pining-for-Buck-Henry lament. Age doesn’t make the host, as the game Zac Efron and the sleepwalking Robert DeNiro have proven. But I decided to crunch the
numbers over the past few years and see if the hosts this season really are more nubile….
We have a bingo.
Through ten episodes (that includes the next two, which have been confirmed) this season’s hosts average 27.6 years old.
In 2008/2009 the hosts averaged 36.7 years old. Wow.
In 2007/2008 it was 34.66.
The ages used are what each host is at the time of filming. Here is a little statistical breakdown:
2009 (10 shows):
Youngest: 17, Taylor Lautner
Oldest: 39, Gerard Butler
Number of hosts in their:
Teens: 2
20s: 3
30s: 5
You know you have a young crowd when 34-year-old Drew Barrymore is your second-oldest host so far.
2008/2009 (22 shows):
Youngest: 21, Zac Efron
Oldest: 63, Steve Martin
Number of hosts in their:
20s: 6
30s: 8
40s: 5
50s: 2
60s: 1
2007/2008 (12 shows):
Youngest: 21, Ellen Page/ Shia LaBeouf
Oldest: 65, Christopher Walken
Number of hosts in their:
20s: 5
30s: 3
40s: 3
60s: 1
This was the writers strike season so it was a short season. And fyi, if you take out Walken the average is still four years higher than this season.
The real take-away statistic is that over 34 shows from the previous two seasons there were 12 hosts older than 40 years old. This season there are zero. Kids are fun and all, but lets mix in some salt and pepper on occasion, shall we Lorne?
Amber
Jason
Nick Burns
Christy
Charlotte
Autumn
Bill
Blain![Josh [geek6.com]](http://a2.twimg.com/profile_images/449316830/neweravatar0509_normal.jpg){kind=avatar}
Reader Comments
I would hope Baldwin and Hanks step in more often to do their thing. In the meantime, I’ll wade through shows with poor comedic timing, like Taylor Swift.
It’s crazy to realize the youngest host ever is this season’s second-oldest host so far.
Only three seasons back? I want the whole history of the show since 1975! With graphs and charts!
I actually would be interested in seeing it all the way back, or perhaps at certain points through every decade. The time consuming part is computing the birthday math. Perhaps after finals…
I wonder how easy it would be (for the kind of person who can do the sort of thing) to create a script that pulled up all the host’s birthdays off the imdb, then put all the info into an XML document that could be imported into Excel, Numbers and the like to generate badass graphs. Maybe even a pie chart, just for kicks.
Sorry, “hosts’ birthdays.”