Adam Driver Shares His Favorite Sketches from Hosting 'Saturday Night Live'

Adam Driver has hosted Saturday Night Live four times, and he wants one more. The only question is what he gets when he hits five.

"I think it's like a green jacket," Driver said. Rich wondered if it was a robe. Driver agreed it was probably a robe and that the green jacket is the Masters. "Maybe I'm confusing the two," he said. "Happens all the time."

Rich wanted to talk about one sketch in particular, and he wanted to get the character name right: Abraham H. Parnassus. Driver played an oil baron visiting a classroom to talk to the kids, with Pete Davidson as his son. As Rich described it, parents bring a prop to show what they do for a living, and the 80-something oil baron brought a crow that had died after getting stuck in oil.

Davidson could not hold it together. Driver did. His explanation was dry: he is "humorless in life, so it's a one-for-one transition." His approach: "Take it really seriously to the point of annoyance. So I was in the zone."

Then there was the cane. At one point, Driver's character impales the dead bird with it, and Driver revealed that was not exactly the plan. "Not impale it quite so succinctly," he said. "I think I was supposed to smash it, but then I just got it first try, and then it was about getting it off."

He also said it wasn't supposed to look like a harpoon in Moby Dick. Looking back, though, he has one regret. "Looking at it now, I'm like, I should have gone farther with it," Driver said.

Rich asked whether Driver had a hand in coming up with the sketch. Not at all, Driver said. He described himself as "boring" in the pitch meetings where writers ask the host what they want to play. "I think I may have come up with maybe two ideas in the four times I've done it," he said. "I go in and they're like, 'What do you want to play?' And I'm like, 'Whatever you come up with is going to be more interesting than what I got.'"

That struck Rich as too humble, especially for someone who nails it when he is out there. Driver explained why he prefers other people's material. "It's easier when it's somebody else's idea. When it's mine, it's almost too self-conscious," he said.

So has any Adam Driver original made air? "Nothing that's been good," he said. He has opinions about which sketches he wants to do, and some that didn't make it that he wishes had. "But it's all their ideas."