Jack Black opened up on the Fly on the Wall podcast about a story Lorne Michaels told him about I Love Lucy legend Desi Arnaz when the Minecraft star hosted Saturday Night Live in April
After Black worked himself up while rehearsing, Michaels told him that when Arnaz hosted, he was afraid he was going to die on-screen
Black said Michaels was a “little worried” for him, too
Jack Black’s recent Saturday Night Live hosting gig got a little grim.
Black, 55, appeared on the May 7 episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast, hosted by Dana Carvey and David Spade, and spoke to the SNL alumni about his recent time hosting in April, his first appearance on the show in 20 years and his fourth time as host. But the show’s producer Lorne Michaels shared an odd anecdote with him after rehearsal.
“Lorne said the funniest thing. I don’t think he was trying to be funny,” Black began. “After the rehearsal, when he saw me do the tiger roll and he saw me doing that rockin’ number, and he saw me sweating and wheezing, he said, ‘I just want to tell you a story.’ ” During the episode, Black sang his monologue, which included a somersault and a journey throughout the studio.
“In the 1970s, this is the beginning, we had Desi Arnaz on the show,” Michaels, 80, told him. Though Arnaz was “getting up there,” the producer said, he was still an “icon” in part because of I Love Lucy, which he starred in with then-wife Lucille Ball. Arnaz’s episode aired Feb. 21, 1976, in the second half of the show’s first season. He was 59 at the time.
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Jack Black (center) during his ‘Saturday Night Live’ musical monologue on April 5
Black told Michaels, “That must have been a trip. I’d love to see that,” but Michaels had a different takeaway from the story.
“He said that Desi was kind of struggling,” Black said. Arnaz wanted to do his “Babalú” number, the “trademark” number for his I Love Lucy character Ricky Ricardo (though he had already begun performing it before the show premiered in 1951). He continued to perform it after the show ended in 1957. It saw him sing while playing the drums alongside the band. In a 1970 appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Arnaz told the hosts “Babalú” was a “catchphrase” and joked, “You never know what you’re gonna catch.”
“Lorne was a little worried about it. Can he still pull it off?” Black said. “And he was doing it, but he could see that he was starting to sweat and really struggle physically while he was ‘Babalú’-ing and he wouldn’t stop.”
“Then he looked closer on the screen and he’s like, ‘Desi’s lips started to turn blue’ and he started to worry like, ‘Oh, he’s about to die,’ ” the Minecraft star said. “And he just pulled the plug on it and said, ‘Just go to commercial, whatever.’ “
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Desi Arnaz on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in 1976
Black was stunned, then asked Michaels, “I was like, ‘Wait a second, are you telling me this story because you’re worried I’m going to die?’ “
“Lorne was a little worried,” he confessed. “He was just warning me not to go too hard. Because if I went full hard as a motherf—–, that I could die.” He also admitted in the episode that he was challenged by the monologue and said all the running around the studio “wasn’t actually my idea.”
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Arnaz died of lung cancer in December 1986 at age 69. His daughter, Lucie Arnaz, told PEOPLE in 2022 that he got sober with the help of her brother Desi Arnaz Jr. a year before he died.
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