Carleton College alum joins 'Saturday Night Live' for 51st Season
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“Saturday Night Live” has hired a Carleton College graduate to join the writing staff of the long-running sketch comedy series, which returns for its new season Saturday. Writer-comedian Claire McFadden, who performed sketch and improv comedy while at Carleton, joins the show's 51st season, along with six other new writers. Variety Magazine reported the news in an exclusive Tuesday.
McFadden is starting at SNL after performing in renowned improvisational comedy troupe Second City in Chicago for seven years. And she isn’t the only new SNL hire with Minnesota connections: St. Paul native Tommy Brennan, who has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” was announced as a new cast member in early September.
McFadden graduated from Carleton, a small private liberal arts college in Northfield, in 2013. Earlier this year, shortly after her SNL audition, McFadden returned to her alma mater south of the Twin Cities to deliver a convocation address advising students on how to do exactly what she’s done — pursue a creative career after majoring in something completely unrelated. Her degree is in environmental studies.
“Step one: Commit. Decide that you are an artist. Asserting that it's something you want, even to yourself, much less to your Nana who survived the famine, can be the hardest part,” McFadden told Carleton students, faculty and staff in February. “A lot of people spend their life denying it, especially coming out of Carleton, where you're expected to do work that is rigorous and smart … choosing to pursue the arts can seem vain, unhelpful, childish, silly, unserious, too easy, not for smart people. I could go on. So let me say up front, you can be an artist. You can be an artist, even if, up until this point, your education, your educational history, doesn't match up.”
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During her speech, titled “Make It Yourself,” McFadden spoke about participating in Lenny Dee, Carleton’s sketch comedy group, and Cujokra, the comedy improv troupe. But, a quintessential liberal arts student, she also studied art with Carleton’s South Pacific study abroad program and Agroecology in China. Her senior thesis studied the energy impacts of American lawns.
McFadden interned for former President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign the summer before senior year and applied for internships at USAID and the United Nations. But that Thanksgiving, she said she felt her first tug to the creative field when she saw a 24-hour Second City improv show in Chicago.
“I stayed for eight hours, and as audience members would get tired and go home, I would move up closer and closer to the stage,” McFadden said in her Carleton “convo” speech. “And I remember being one row back at 3 a.m. and watching this cast of delirious people goofing off and being so effortlessly funny. And I felt a powerful ray of desire. I wanted to be up there … I didn't want it because it was prestigious or because it would help me get the next thing. I wanted, in a very simple way, to be doing it.”
She said she read comedy memoirs, listened to improv podcasts and read up on the career paths of favorite TV writers. She joined comedy groups and began making her own work, performing at sketch festivals. And to make it work, she held all sorts of part-time jobs — a picture framer, a gift wrapper, craft services, a baby sitter. The list goes on.
There was not a clear path, but she offered this advice to Carleton students:
“One, commit. Decide to be an artist. Accept that devoting your time and life to a creative pursuit is worthy. Two, move to a city where other people are making the kind of thing that you want to make. Three, get a day job. Work as little as possible. Four, make your own stuff. Maximize the time and energy that you are making your own stuff.”
For McFadden, making your own stuff meant doing variety shows in the back of bars in tiny black box theaters, asking performers she liked to coach their rehearsals, writing half a screenplay and tv pilots, and practicing performances in empty storefronts. She recalled other projects, too, like a sketch show she worked on about an IMAX projector that sucks in a museum docent and tries to mate with the docent.
And this work has been honored. McFadden’s web series “Framed” was an Official Selection of the New York Television Festival in 2018, she writes on her website, and her web series “Denise Sells Houses” was an Official Selection in the Shorts Program at Just For Laughs in 2025.
McFadden said she got her lucky break when she was hired to perform with Second City and to write for JackBox Games, a party game developer. With Second City, she initially understudied with them, then she traveled around the country with their touring company and eventually she joined the main stage cast in Chicago. They put on eight shows a week.
On that chilly winter morning, McFadden stressed to her Carleton College community to continue making things, even when it seems silly. Every opportunity she’s received — from comedy accolades to a screen test with SNL — she credits to this work.
“Everything big and sparkly and exciting and high-stakes starts with you being creative on your couch in a friend's basement, in a classroom on a bus. It's all the same,” McFadden said. “You are already doing it. You just keep going. You pay attention, and it will expand into cool opportunities. And the worst case scenario is that there's no cool, sparkly opportunities, then you've spent your life making stuff that you like.”
Correction (Oct. 2, 2025): A previous version of this article misstated a former job Claire McFadden held.
