The Best SNL Celebrity Host of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 14, 7:30AM EST

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The Best SNL Celebrity Host of All Time — © Courtesy of NBC

Saturday Night Live, or SNL, first hit TV screens in 1975, making it among the most enduring shows in the history of the medium. Creator Lorne Michaels continues to run the show. Some of the original cast went on to become among America’s best-known and most successful comedians. These include John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. The show continues to launch stars who make successful transitions to movies. The most successful of these was probably Eddie Murphy, who became a movie megastar.

The show also has been remarkably successful for NBC. It draws as many as 10 million viewers every episode. Estimates are that SNL brings in over $100 million in ad revenue per year.

To determine the best SNL host of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed audience ratings and other data for all episodes from the IMDb. SNL hosts were ranked based on an index composed of two elements: the average IMDb user rating for all episodes hosted by a guest and the total number of episodes hosted by that guest.

Guest hosts have been comedians, singers, politicians, future presidents, sports figures, actors and reality-show stars. When guest hosts click, it usually is because they are able to poke fun at themselves, are on the same page with the comedy troupe and enjoy the process of doing sketch comedy. The guest hosts also have to understand their role in a sketch and be willing to take chances, no matter how outrageous the skit is.
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The best Saturday Night Live celebrity host of all time is Steve Martin. Here are the details:

Average episode rating: 7.7/10 (1,389 votes)
Appearances as host: 14 (Oct. 23, 1976, to Jan. 31, 2009)
Highest-rated episode: S3, Ep18 (with musical guest The Blues Brothers)

In determining the best SNL host of all time, the average user ratings were calculated using the number of user votes as a weight. While the average user rating for each host was given full weight in the index, the number of episodes hosted by each guest was given a half-weighting. IMDb ratings data was collected on December 29, 2021.

Click here to see all the best SNL celebrity hosts of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.