“Mike Schur, who wrote for SNL and The Office before creating Parks and Rec and many other TV shows, told me something eye-opening,” Pablo Torre said this week on his Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. “Mike told me that out of all of the SNL auditions he has ever seen — all of which happen to occur in front of the show’s creator Lorne Michaels — nobody has ever made him laugh harder than Will Forte.”

Forte almost avoided the audition altogether, the comic revealed this week on Torre’s show. He was a writer on That ‘70s Show, which had just been picked up for two more seasons. Forte had never enjoyed that kind of job security — plus, he was terrified to try out for SNL. But Michaels talked him into auditioning, with the support of his sitcom bosses.

Much of the material in Forte’s try-out eventually made it into SNL sketches.