Entertainment
While many “SNL” stars were once discovered at comedy clubs or improv and sketch theaters, it’s YouTube, Instagram and TikTok that now also serve as incubators for comedic up-and-comers.
Lorne Michaels and the rest of the “Saturday Night Live” brain trust have adapted how new talent is scouted over the NBC show’s 51 years on the air. While many stars were once discovered at comedy clubs or improv and sketch theaters, it’s YouTube, Instagram and TikTok that now also serve as incubators for comedic up-and-comers.
With Season 52 set to premiere Sept. 26, here’s some of how this year’s two new cast members stood out from the pack by combining traditional and modern sensibilities.
Grace Reiter
Fans of Tim Robinson’s critically acclaimed HBO comedy thriller, “The Chair Company,” which wrapped up its first season in November, may recognize Reiter. On the show, she plays Tara, the controlling, abrasive fiancee of Natalie (Sophia Lillis), the daughter of the main character (Robinson).
Otherwise, Reiter has been busy making a name for herself through a mix of traditional and new platforms, finding viral success by using her physical comedy, theatrical overacting and “take the bit too far” energy to skewer pop culture and Hollywood itself. Her nearly 45-minute online parody “The Hunger Games (but Better),” which she said she made with friends over three days last year, has nearly 14 million views since being posted on YouTube in November.
Last year, she appeared in the off-Broadway comedy “Ginger Twinsies,” a parody of “The Parent Trap.” And in 2021, Reiter did a virtual stand-up set on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” in which she rated her childhood cartoon crushes.
Aside from “SNL,” Reiter will star in the upcoming Netflix mockumentary series “Minimum Wage,” about overworked teenagers in a pizzeria, which debuts Oct. 26. She is also a writer and director on the show, which is adapted from a web series of the same name that Reiter also worked on.
Reiter has about 4 million followers on TikTok and more than 740,000 on Instagram. At 25, she is the first “SNL” cast member born in the 21st century.
Saidah Belo-Osagie
Unlike Reiter, Belo-Osagie, a 29-year-old Nigerian American comedian from New York, has a comparatively modest online following. But she has been quietly establishing herself in the industry, working at Tribeca Productions and Gotham Film & Media Institute, and as a director’s assistant on shows including ABC’s “For Life” and Netflix’s “Kaleidoscope.”
Her 2020 romantic dramedy short film, “Tinge,” which she wrote and directed, was picked up by festivals including NewFest and East Village Queer Film Festival. She also created the event series “Afrobeats Futura,” which featured art from the African diaspora. She performed her solo clown show “Saidah Gets Closure,” about surviving heartbreak in modern times, around New York last year and this spring.
Belo-Osagie quit her job in 2024 to focus full-time on her comedy, which combines witty social satire with physicality. It’s then that she started to build an identity on TikTok and soon had a viral hit with a character that seems destined for a Weekend Update guest correspondent segment: “girl who’s secretly happy her neighborhood’s gentrifying.”
“I want to embrace the contradictions that exist within us,” she said in 2025. “It’s using comedy to be like, ‘Am I alone in feeling two different things at the same time?’”
By joining “SNL,” she helps fill a void left by Ego Nwodim, who departed in 2025 before Season 51, leaving the show with no Black women in the cast.
“My mother’s mantra, ‘Make hay while the sun shines,’ motivates me to seize every opportunity, absorb knowledge and always give my best effort,” Belo-Osagie said in 2024.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
