Amy Poehler Asked Marcelo Hernandez About His Roots and He Got Real About What the Immigrant Experience Does to a Kid

Marcelo Hernandez, the Cuban-Dominican SNL cast member who has become one of the most exciting presences in American comedy, sat down with Amy Poehler on her podcast Good Hang and delivered an episode that is equal parts hilarious and genuinely moving. He showed up with a giant vase of sunflowers, rode his bike to the studio while his assistant drove the flowers separately because he did not want to get them in trouble, and spent over an hour being exactly the person his SNL colleague Sarah Sherman described before the interview even started: a puppy who just did a backflip and then bought you a Beats pill because you made a joke about wanting one.

Amy Poehler is a Saturday Night Live legend, Parks and Recreation star and institution founder whose Good Hang podcast has become one of the better celebrity interview shows because she asks questions that actually go somewhere. She brought Marcelo in because she wanted to understand him better, describing him as the cast member she felt she knew the least about, and what she got was a conversation that will make you laugh out loud and then sit with something a little heavier when he starts talking about what it means to be the child of immigrants who gave up everything so you could be here doing backflips on a late night stage.

From Baseball Cartwheels in Miami to Saturday Night Live and the Journey Was Anything but Straight

Marcelo grew up in Miami, the son of a Cuban mother who escaped communism and a Dominican father, and his childhood was essentially a series of attempts by his parents to get him tired enough to sleep. Baseball did not work because he spent his time in the outfield doing cartwheels and playing with insects until his mother decided he was making the family look bad. Soccer worked because it never stops moving, which is exactly what an unmedicated child with enormous amounts of energy needs, and he played it well enough to get recruited to John Carroll University in Ohio after editing his own highlight videos and emailing every school he could find.

He quit soccer in college to pursue standup, shook the hands of all twenty-seven teammates one by one after telling them he was leaving, won five hundred dollars at an amateur competition at the Funny Stop Comedy Club in Cuyahoga Falls and decided he was the real deal. His mother was supportive because she had never understood soccer and was relieved nobody would be kicking him anymore. From there he built a career that led to Just for Laughs, then an SNL audition where nobody laughed, and then a phone call at his apartment that made him cry and immediately declare that he was going to make a million dollars. It turns out you do not make that, he told Amy, and the audience lost it.

Sarah Sherman Showed Up on Zoom With His Face as Her Screensaver and Said Everything We Needed to Know

Before Marcelo arrived, Amy brought in his SNL castmate Sarah Sherman on Zoom, who appeared on screen with a Marcelo Hernandez screensaver as her background between two large photos of his face. Sherman described him as someone with major puppy dog energy who would be doing backflips with fellow cast member Cam Patterson at three in the morning on writing nights while she was riding like a maniac trying to finish her work. She also noted that he calls her on Wednesday evenings during hiatus to ask what clubs she is performing at when she is lying on her couch watching X Files, pushing her to keep getting on stage in a way that most standups, who she described as bloodsuckers hoping nobody else gets stage time, would never do.

Her question for Marcelo was about when and where he was actually writing his jokes, because he had put out an hour of standup and was constantly touring, and her underlying point was really about what we allow ourselves to claim we are good at. When Marcelo eventually answered he was honest about feeling more confident in his standup writing than his sketch writing, and talked about the writers at SNL who had helped him figure out how to translate his instincts into a format he did not grow up in.

The Part Where He Talks About Being Latino Is the Part You Will Not Forget

The moments that will stay with anyone who watches are not always the funniest ones but the ones where Marcelo talks about what it means to be Latino right now. He described doing standup in Spanish as a growing part of his work, saying that getting a room full of Latino people together to scream in Spanish feels very powerful given everything the community is going through. He talked about his Cuban mother, who came to America after the government took everything and spent years telling her kids they were going to change their last name to Smith because she wanted so badly to be American, and about how that specific immigrant experience made him what he called a young boomer who never got to have mental health because there was nothing to complain about compared to what his parents had survived.

He also founded a scholarship at his college named after the two teachers who ran a Shakespearean performance class that changed his life, and has been bringing teachers who believed in him to SNL ever since to show them what their encouragement built. The episode ends with him giving Amy an extended closing speech about her accomplishments while the production team was already trying to end the recording, getting genuinely emotional and refusing to stop, which is the most Marcelo Hernandez thing that could possibly happen and also exactly why the Latino community should watch this episode immediately.