‘SNL’ paid some to be in studio audience
Some audience members of the live comedy show were paid to be present.
Before the coronavirus outbreak, tickets to join the studio audience of “Saturday Night Live” were a precious commodity — offered free by NBC but so hard to obtain that some comedy fans were willing to pay money for them.
But now the tickets to this long-running sketch show — still free, and still scarce — come with an added bonus: Members of its studio audience have been paid to attend.
The payments are the result of new guidelines implemented by the state of New York, which has been regulating the reopening of businesses and industries during the pandemic.
On Monday night, the state’s health department confirmed that “SNL” had followed its reopening guidelines by “casting” members of the live audience for its season premiere Saturday — the show’s first live episode since March 7 — and paying them for their time.
Sean Ludwig, who attended the “SNL” season premiere over the weekend, said he and seven friends who had gone with him each received a check for $150 from Universal Television, a division of NBC’s parent company, when the show was over.
“We had no idea we would be paid before we were handed checks,” Ludwig said. Some tickets to the show were reserved for health care workers.
National Book Award finalists set
Two novels with eerie echoes of world catastrophes, both set at summer houses, are among this year’s five fiction finalists for the National Book Award — Lydia Millet’s “The Children’s Bible” and Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind.”
Millet is the only one of 25 finalists across five categories unveiled Tuesday who had previously been long-listed for a National Book Award (in 2016, for “Sweet Lamb of Heaven”). The other three fiction finalists are Deesha Philyaw for “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” Charles Yu for “Interior Chinatown,” and Douglas Stuart for his debut, “Shuggie Bain.”
The nonfiction finalists include “The Dead Are Arising,” a new biography of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, and “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” by Jenn Shapland. The three other nonfiction finalists are Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “The Undocumented Americans,” Claudio Saunt’s “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory” and Jerald Walker’s “How to Make a Slave and Other Essays.” Winners will be unveiled online Nov. 18.