Naperville native makes mark on SNL
When he got the phone call saying he'd been chosen to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” Paul Brittain didn't react.
“I was more in the speechless and in-amazement mode rather than screaming ‘Yay!' in the streets,” said the 34-year-old Naperville native. “If I could go back and change one thing, it is that I would scream ‘Yay!' in the plaza.”
He would have been right to scream. Since that fateful call last summer, Brittain — the nephew of comedy legend Bob Newhart — moved from Chicago to New York and spent the past year working alongside comedy giants like Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg.
Brittain developed fans nationwide for his impressions of Johnny Depp, James Franco, Matthew McConaughey and a Spanish-speaking ESPN Deportes sportscaster who peppers English phrases into his reports, such as “snowpocalypse” and “no soup for you.”
Each week, Brittain wrote and performed with A-listers like Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert DeNiro.
Before reaching this comedy pinnacle, Brittain was just a kid working at the Giordano's in Naperville and making funny videos with his friends at Naperville North High School.
In one video Brittain remembers, he documented a typical day in his life. It opened with him waking up, watching an aerobics show on TV, and eating a stick of butter. Then he drove his friends to school in the trunk of his car.
“(All of the videos we made) are weird, and I don't know if any of them hold up as hilarious anymore,” he said. “In school, I wasn't the crazy, wacky, class clown type. But I think people at Naperville North would remember me and my friends as being a funny group of people.”
They'd probably remember him as a nice, bright and highly creative kid, as his former teacher Sarah Adamson does. She taught him in an academically gifted program in Naperville District 203 called Project IDEA.
“He was a very pleasant student. He was a little on the quiet side, but when he did say something, it was pretty amazing. He was not ever the boisterous or loud type ... You'd love a whole classrooms of Paul Brittans,” said Adamson, a longtime Naperville resident. “He was a very good writer. I always thought someday he could be a writer or some sort of a problem solver.”
A longtime fan of SNL, Adamson said she religiously watches her former student on the show every Saturday night.
“I'm just so proud of him. He's really made it,” she said.
Brittain went to the University of Illinois, where he majored in finance and Spanish. Then he came back to Chicago and did improv at iO, formerly known as Improv Olympic. After performing one night, he and fellow cast member Vanessa Bayer were both called to audition for Saturday Night Live. They flew to New York, met with executive producer Lorne Michaels, and both were invited to join the cast.
Chicago is home — or at least a pass-through — for so many SNL members, and now Brittain is part of that elite group. While his fans moan that he didn't get enough airtime this season, he says it's been an amazing journey.
“I always planned to do comedy, but obviously you need to be able to support yourself otherwise,” he said. “For now, I hope to keep doing what I'm doing.”