Martha Stewart's parole officer wouldn't let her host Saturday Night Live: "That bastard"
Stewart says she was only allowed out of the house eight hours a day upon release from prison.
Screenshot: The Tonight Show/YouTube
With Saturday Night Live‘s 50th anniversary special coming up, there’s been a lot of looking back on the show’s history. And now we’ve got a “what could’ve been” from Martha Stewart: apparently, she was asked to host the comedy show in 2005 after spending time in prison (or, as she jokingly calls it, “that camp that I was in for a while”). But though she wanted to take the hosting gig, she told Jimmy Fallon that “my parole officer wouldn’t give me the time to do it.”
“I was allowed to be out of my house eight hours a day,” she explained on The Tonight Show. (Unfortunately, SNL is a bit more time intensive than that.) “The parole officer said no?” Fallon repeated. Stewart replied: “No, that bastard!” The entrepreneur is still “so pissed” about the situation, she admitted, noting she still has the name and number of the parole officer in question.
From SNL boss Lorne Michaels’ perspective, there was probably no better moment to get Stewart on the SNL stage than fresh off her prison sentence. Nevertheless, she remains a relevant cultural figure, most recently the subject of the Netflix documentary Martha. Stewart wasn’t a particular fan of the doc, offering a plethora of criticisms; she had no reaction when Fallon called it “one of the best documentaries out there.” On a previous Tonight Show appearance, she conceded that it was “fine,” but said “It left out a lot, so I’m going to talk to them about maybe doing version two. There’s a lot more to my life. I mean, you know, I’ve lived a long time and I just thought, you know, maybe we’ve left out some stuff.”
Publicly, there’s been enough Martha Stewart to warrant nine different impressions from different comics over several decades of Saturday Night Live. Stewart, who graciously noted that “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” chose David Spade as her favorite. However, she still wants the chance to host the show herself: “I would be amazing,” she declared. “Start a campaign.”