Ben Stiller Thinks His Mom Would've Been A Better Fit On Saturday Night Live Than Him

Ben Stiller had access to a comedy masterclass in his own home growing up with parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, but he didn't really "appreciate what they did" until he was older, he admits in a new New York Times interview. He grew up "wanting to be my own person, not being into their comedy." What made him fall in love with comedy was Saturday Night Live, and luckily—despite apparently rejecting the comedy stylings of Stiller & Meara—his parents were able to give him a leg up there, too. As he says, "When I was starting out, with audition tapes or I did an audition reel for Saturday Night Live, I had my parents in them."

Stiller was hired as a featured player on the show in 1989 (after already having a comic short aired on the series), but he quit after four episodes because he was "too nervous" and "didn't enjoy it." And perhaps they chose the wrong family member from his audition tape: "My mom would have been better on that show," he says now. Though Stiller believes Meara "never loved comedy," he nevertheless thinks "she was more naturally adept at it than my dad, actually." (Frank Costanza fans are clutching their pearls.) 

Stiller says he shares "more of my mom's sense of humor than my dad's," but it sounds like they also shared a desire to break out of the lane they got stuck in. The Zoolander star always "wanted to be a serious director," but accidentally became the comedy blockbuster star of a generation. Similarly, Meara "was a serious actor who then my dad drew into comedy, who came up with the idea for them to do their comedy act to make money after they’d been married for five or six years in the ’50s," Stiller says. "My mother was more of a polished stage performer, like in nightclubs. She knew how to work a crowd, and she wrote plays, and she was more interested in writing and reading and acting in different kinds of things." And she extended those dramatic ambitions to her son: "She saw me doing comedy, and she’s like, 'That’s great, but I liked Greenberg' or 'I liked Permanent Midnight.'"