NBC TV SNL Tickets How to Get FREE Saturday Night Live Tickets

How to Get FREE Saturday Night Live Tickets

Added on 12/12/09 by Betsy 0 comments

After spending a pre-dawn December morning on a freezing New York City sidewalk, I have some tips for scoring those elusive SNL tickets.

Before I go into the standby ticket process, I will tell you about the normal ticket process. In the month of August you send an email to snltickets@nbcuni.com which enters you into a drawing. After going down to NBC studios in Rockafeller center and talking to the pages who manage the ticket distribution for standbys, your chances of getting tickets through this method are about 5%.

If you are lucky enough to get tickets through the drawing you will be notified in September. There are 2 different shows every Saturday night, one is the dress rehearsal which is held around 8:30 and of course the live taping. You will be issued tickets for one of these if you are lucky enough to get tickets at all. You have no control over the date of the show you will attend and they will only give you 2 tickets, which sucks if you have more than one friend.If you have not heard and September has passed then you have no chance of getting tickets for that year, in other words tickets for 2009-2010 season have already been distributed and are no longer available.

However that weird method of distribution which seems so frustrating leaves a door open to getting tickets another way. That is by stand by.

Now NBC has already sent out the almost 300 tickets for each show, but that doesn't mean that the recipient who registered in August can afford to go in April or they might get tickets on their Great Aunts 97th birthday and be guilted into spending that particular date eating rice pudding with MeeMaw rather than at SNL.

NBC has no idea how many people will be attending a taping. So they do not ever know how many stand by ticket holders will get in.

My friend and I stopped by Friday morning and asked what time people line up, we were told people sleep out under the Rainbow Room sign. We decided that since it was December and Blake Lively was the host it was safe to come at around 4am and at least sleep some in a bed.

When we arrived at 4am, there was a line of people sleeping in camp chairs. The line didn't seem that long though so we stood out waiting for that magic time of 7am standby ticket distribution. This gave me plenty of time to interview the other people in line about their experience.

One guy had come to Taylor Swift's show a few weeks prior and waited for stand by tickets. He was 123rd in line and not realizing there was really no shot of him getting into either show he came back at 11:00 at night only to be sent home. We also learned that the first people in line had lined up at 11:30 AM Friday, just before lunch and set up camp.

We also discussed strategy, as a stand by you have a choice of getting dress rehearsal or live taping tickets. There were different theories on which were better tickets, or which would be more likely to get you in. Some said they had heard the dress rehearsal is more fun since the cast is more relaxed than at the live show.

My friend and I decided to choose the show that had the least amount of stand by tickets given out already. This seemed like a sound plan until it was 7am and we were presented with the option of number 38 & 39 for the dress rehersal or 44 & 45 for the live taping. So that means that even lining up at 4am we were 71st and 72nd in line. We impulsively chose the live show since it didn't seem like all that big of a difference. We had to be back at 10:45 and line up in order.

At 10:35, we walked by all those lucky people who got tickets in the drawing last year and lined up. While waiting I quizzed the page on the odds, she said that sometimes there is only 1 standby seat open and one night there were 90 so it just depends. I asked her how many people got into the dress rehersal, she told me 6 which means a lot of people sleeping on that sidewalk didn't get in.

The page also told us that the seats on the floor that are regular chairs that you sometimes see in the wide shots on TV are reserved for NBC corporate execs or celebrities. They are not for the public since they have direct access to the stage. Instead the general audience sit in stadium seats in the back.

The people with the reserved seats were in a roped area directly across from us and we did see Brian Baumgartner, who plays Kevin on The Office.

After 11:00 they pulled the first 30 standby ticket holders through security. It was repeatedly announced that the first 30 will be taken upstairs but this is no guarantee of getting a seat, that the first 30 always get to go up and then they will fill in seats and either call for more standbys or send the remainders home.

After another 10 minutes of standing there, we were told "Thanks, We Don't Need Anyone Else".

Lessons from the experience, if this is on your bucket list plan on lining up at lunch time Friday and sleeping there, I would try to be first or second or it isn't worth your time.