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Emil Wakim Just Joined the SNL Season 50 Cast! Watch His Tonight Show Stand-Up
The Brooklyn-based writer and comedian made his NBC late night debut in April 2022, and joins Saturday Night Live as a Featured Player.
Emil Wakim is one of the three new faces joining the cast as a Featured Player for Saturday Night Live Season 50 — but it won't be the first time the Brooklyn-based comedian and writer has appeared on NBC late night.
On April 5, 2022, Wakim made his debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he performed a six-minute set. The Lebanese-American comedian's jokes included how "y'all means all" doesn't really work for everyone, thoughts on struggling to embrace his heritage, and how having "woke friends" can actually be frustrating.
"You know, we're in this movement now where people love diversity and everyone loves culture," he joked to The Tonight Show audience. "It's amazing! It's very beautiful. It's just exhausting to me now to always have to be proud of my culture."
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"Because I never learned how to growing up. All I learned how to do growing up was how to push it away to get by," he continued.
Watch Emil Wakim's full stand-up set in The Tonight Show video above.
All about SNL cast member Emil Wakim
Emil Wakim is a Lebanese-American stand-up comic, actor, and writer. Born in Chicago, Wakim was raised in Bloomington, Indiana. In addition to making his Tonight Show debut in 2022, he was also selected as a New Face of Comedy at that year's Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. In September 2024 he was named one of 2024’s Comedians You Should and Will Know by Vulture.
In a recent interview with Vulture, he named his Tonight Show stand-up set as the proudest moment of his career so far, saying, "It’s still crazy to me that I survived it."
"Just the anticipation leading up to the taping was crazy. I was so anxious, it didn’t even register. I’m shocked I could fall asleep at all the night before," he admitted.
"It was also huge for my parents, because it was finally a thing where all their friends and co-workers knew what it was," he explained. "So it gave them a lot of closure that they could stop wincing when they tried to explain to their friends that a JFL [Just For Laughs] audition was a big deal or whatever. A blurry screenshot from the YouTube video of me shaking Jimmy Fallon’s hand is both of their phone wallpapers still, which is cool but also a bit much."
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Wakim joins the cast alongside new Featured Players Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline.
SNL Season 50 premieres on September 28
Watch Saturday Night Live's return for Season 50 at 11:30 p.m. on NBC, streaming next day on Peacock.
