Wyatt Cenac And Norm MacDonald Once Got Into A Fight At ‘SNL,’ And Stephen Colbert Had To Break It Up

While promoting the new TBS comedy People of Earth on The Late Show, former Daily Show correspondents Wyatt Cenac and Stephen Colbert took a familiar trip down memory lane. The talk show host, who once wrote for Saturday Night Live‘s “Weekend Update” segment during Norm MacDonald’s tenure, brought up a tumultuous story about the performer getting into a fight with an intern because of a late night hallway soccer match gone wrong. Said intern was Cenac, and if this story rings a bell, that’s because the stand-up comedian has told it before.

However, what made his and Colbert’s shared reminiscence so special was the fact that both men were there when it happened. Plus audiences had never heard the Late Show host discuss it before:

“I was a guest writer there and I would jump in on these soccer games. It would be like three o’clock in the morning, and people are like on deadline trying to get their scripts done for Saturday. It was Friday night. I was hanging out with Norm because sometimes I would sit in and write on ‘Weekend Update,’ and Norm got into a huge fight one night in the soccer game. And it was with you!”

Cenac confirmed Colbert’s remembrance of the famed event, then launched into his side of the story:

“Early in the game [Colin Quinn] and Norm had been jawing at each other, and Norm was also trying to quit smoking so he was extra agitated. At some point Norm and I got into a bit of a scrum for the ball, and I wound up clipping him in the shin. He got really mad, like you do when you’re trying to quit smoking, and grabbed me and tried to throw me across the room — which is not how soccer’s played. I pushed him off of me because I was 19 and didn’t really understand stations of power, and then we got into a shoving match and started yelling at each other.”

To cap things off, Colbert took full credit for a later flub when he and Cenac met each other again much later in their careers. Realizing Cenac had interned for SNL as a teenager, he told the young stand-up all about the famous hallway soccer fight without realizing his listener was one of the fighters.

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