Cut for the Laugh With Double Emmy-Nominated Editor Kelly Lyon

Kelly's Adobe Workflow Breakdowns

"For both projects, Adobe Premiere's transcribe tool and text window were incredibly powerful. Once Tig's two performances were transcribed, I could easily search for a joke using the text window so I could quickly A/B the options and make sure the strongest version of each joke landed in my final cut. When reviewing options with Tig and director Stephanie Allynne, they were impressed at how quickly I could pull up anything they wanted to see across 3 hours of performances.

For John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's In LA, my colleagues Sean & Ryan McIlraith and myself all collaborated remotely. We used Jump Desktop, Adobe Premiere, and Evercast to collaborate with the writers, producers, and each other.

With Live TV, the turnaround is always quick. After the first episode aired on May 3rd, 2024, John Mulaney decided he wanted to tighten up all of the pre-tapes a bit to give more airtime to the live guests and phone calls. We all raced to tighten our cuts before the subsequent five episodes. Coming from a background at SNL, we are all used to last minute changes and we were able to deliver on time (even if just hours or minutes before going live)."

NFS Interview With Kelly Lyon

Editor's Note: The following interview is edited for length and clarity.

NFS: I've seen pretty much everything that you've edited (give or take), but I was a huge fan of Everybody's in LA. That was such a fun little treat this summer.

Kelly Lyon: Oh, that was so fun to work on. It was classic Mulaney.

I was cutting a standup special for Langston Kerman—that is John's directorial debut, the first special he's directed. And I was working on that, and then [John Mulaney] was like, "oh, hey, I'm working on this other show. Maybe you can cut some sketches for me."

So we dive right into this insane live show with just so much footage, so many unscripted, improvised sketches that we're really putting together in the edit. And I was like, "oh, this is a real job."

And then to get the Emmy nomination ... it was such a surprise and I was so thrilled. And of course for Tig [Notaro's] special [Tig Notaro: Hello Again] also, I was completely surprised. My expectations were nothing. I've never been nominated for an editing Emmy before, and then it's like, it's two.

NFS: Yeah. That's awesome. I saw that you worked on SNL, too. Is that how you cut your teeth in the comedy world?

Lyon: Yes. I was super lucky when started my career.

I worked at a place called Crew Cuts in New York answering phones. They happened to be cutting the parody commercials for SNL, and I kind of set my sights on Debbie McMurtrey, who was editing all of the parody commercials at the time. I was like, I want to be her assistant.

I stayed late when they were cutting SNL—I'd come in on Saturdays unpaid just to hang out and see the process. And eventually I did become Debbie's assistant and learned so much about comedy from working with her. And then once I got in the SNL door, that's when my career really has exploded. So many successful and talented people go through 30 Rock and come out and do all these other projects.

NFS: That's so awesome. Working at SNL was always a dream of mine. Did you start as an assistant editor there, or did you get to start cutting immediately once you got in?

Lyon: It was wild because I was Debbie's assistant, so I would assist her on the pre-tapes, but then she had a Monday through Friday job editing commercials mostly. So there were some weekends where she's [cutting commercials] five days and then [will cut an extra day for] SNL at the end.

As you know, they film those pre-tapes on Fridays. They're live on network TV Saturday night, so it's working a full week and then sprinting a marathon at the very end of it, and then having one day off to start over. That could get pretty exhausting.

There was a point when Debbie started asking the director at the time, James Signorelli, like, hey—if a script came through that wasn't as exciting to her, or if she was unavailable for whatever reason, she was like, let's let Kelly try this one. And Jim was really down and let me try.

So for about a year I was assisting, and then I started cutting a few pre-tapes starting my second year. That was super lucky.

And then from there it became more and more. Over the course of my time assisting at SNL and cutting those early pre-tapes, the show really evolved because then Andy [Samberg], [Akiva Schaffer], and Yorma [Taccon] (The Lonely Island) were hired, and I actually cut the very first pre-tape they shot for the show called "JJ Casuals".

There's a whole story on their podcast where they came to Crew Cuts to work with me, and then Jim kind of didn't really let them stay in the edit, and they got stuck in the elevator on their way back to 30 Rock—it was like three in the morning on a Friday, and it took the fire department two hours to get them out.

After that experience they started just cutting their own things. But basically once they started filming the Digital Shorts, all of a sudden there was the pre-tape film unit and then there was the Digital Short unit. And over the years that I was at SNL, they added two or three more units of pre-tape. So by the end, I was working with Matt and Oz cutting every single week.

NFS: You worked mostly with Matt and Oz and their unit, you said?

Lyon: Yeah, the Beast Unit we were called at that time.

I also worked with Rhys Thomas when he got elevated to director, when Jim stepped down and Rhys started directing. I cut a lot of those early pieces with Rhys, and then Adam Epstein kind of became Rhys' editor, and I became Matt and Oz's editor and went from there. And then Sean McIlraith, who I'm [Emmy] nominated alongside, was my assistant editor at SNL. It's so cool to see him elevated to editor and go on and do his own things, and then we get to collaborate and be nominated for an Emmy together. It's just the best. It's so wonderful.

NFS: Did you happen to edit the Jay-Z Matt and Oz sketch?

Lyon: Yeah, I did all those Mike O'Brien sketches. I love working with Mike O'Brien, love his sensibility.

I also got to work with Tim and Zach from I Think You Should Leave at SNL when they were writers there. I always loved working with them. They're hilarious, it's so fun to work with those guys. And I met Mulaney when he started in 2010. I'd already been on the show five seasons before that.

It's very cool to see his career explode. We have that shorthand from working under those crazy time constraints together at SNL. And I've cut his last three standup specials for Netflix, and then now Everybody's in LA.

NFS: What's the difference workflow-wise between editing a sketch versus a standup special? I'm sure those come with their own challenges.

Lyon: I feel like sometimes Multicam work doesn't get as much respect from editors because when people watch it, they feel like, oh, they performed this show, and this was the performance, and then you're just choosing cameras.

But in reality—for instance, for Baby J—they filmed three shows, and I'm seamlessly trying to marry them all together so that I'm getting the very best performance from each show, and I'm keeping his pacing proper when I'm cutting between shows—I'm pacing up moments that maybe linger too long. They linger long enough for a live audience, but a TV audience has a different attention span—so tightening up clapping breaks, sometimes rearranging the order of the jokes.

For Tig's Special, which I'm nominated for, she did two performances, and each performance was about an hour and a half, and the last half hour was her improvising on the piano.

So I had about an hour of improvised piano riffing from Tig to close out her special. Unlike your standard performance where the comedian has a set hour and it's the same and they perform it twice, I had all of this material to choose from, and it was a process of trying to pick the very best moments from the two shows and then blend them together seamlessly so it feels like a singular audience, a singular experience, and that my cuts aren't distracting the TV audience from that feeling of being in the room.

NFS: I think I always assumed it was just the same show, which I guess means great editing!

Lyon: I mean, that's the trick. It's almost like being a really good VFX composite artist where it's like, if you've done your job perfectly, no one notices there's any effects at all.

I feel that way with editing a standup special. If I've done my job well, then you don't notice the edits all feel invisible, and you don't notice me jumping between shows. You feel like you were there. And sometimes that just means keeping in a few imperfections here and there, because most comedians do roll with whatever happens.

I'm currently cutting a special for Bill Burr for Hulu, his first for Hulu, and they filmed three shows, and he interacts with the audience a lot. He doesn't do crowd work, but if someone heckles somebody else up, he'll go off on a whole other rant or tangent, and sometimes it's so funny. And so I find with that edit, we're keeping a lot of those live moments in there to help you feel like you were there for that taping.

NFS: Yeah, that's super cool. Is it a different dynamic working with the comic on their special versus working with a director on, say, a sketch?

Lyon: It's very different, I would say.

I mean, it's interesting because comedians have so much confidence on stage, but a lot of them are not used to seeing themselves from the audience's perspective. They're used to performing their show out of their own face towards a crowd and seeing it from that perspective. So some comedians find it very hard to watch themselves, and so that sometimes makes the edit a little bit more tricky, because if a comedian has trouble watching their own face, then they might ask for choices that don't necessarily serve the comedy the best because it's like, oh, well, I don't want to be so close, or I don't want to be so far away—it's very interesting.

So part of my job when working on the standup special is helping to reassure the comedian that their material is really coming through the cameras, and that's what the audience is seeing in the live show. That's very different than if you're working with the comedian that wrote a sketch. When someone is acting like someone else, there's a little bit less self-consciousness there sometimes because they're playing a character. Even though standups sometimes do take on a stage persona, it's still mostly them.

NFS: Standup is extremely vulnerable, and you don't think about it when it looks so natural. But I imagine the behind the scenes of that is a lot of self-consciousness.

Lyon: I can say when I cut Comeback Kid for Mulaney in 2015, he had just had that network show on Fox called Mulaney that had just been canceled. That was the last thing anyone had seen from him, and he was in a very precarious and vulnerable state when he filmed that special.

But his standup is so strong, it's so good. And so we really worked hard on that. We reordered some of the jokes. We really tried to dial it in just so that it would be the perfect counterpoint to the way that his sitcom was received. And luckily, it did come out with a great reception. People really loved that special, and it just built from there.

So then when we worked on Kid Gorgeous, he was in a different mental place. It wasn't coming from as nervous of a place—he had more confidence. And then by the time we cut Baby J he was in a great place. He was like, this is the first time I've been able to just watch myself and actually enjoy it and not be freaking out.

I'm putting words in his mouth. He didn't say the words "freak me out", but "it's the first time I've been able to comfortably watch myself perform and feel like this is a good special. I'm proud of the work that I've done."

So it's interesting to see that evolution and his confidence. But just now working with Bill Burr, he found it hard to watch himself, even though he's incredibly seasoned. This is his fifth or sixth special, I can't even remember. So you just never know. I think for some people it's just hard for them to watch themselves.

NFS: For Everybody's in LA, did John Mulaney direct the pre-roll sketches, or did you work with him a lot for the sketches themselves?

Lyon: John weighed in on everything. Nothing went on that show that didn't go through Mulaney directly at some point, but he did not direct the sketches. So they hired a few different directors that shot those.

Then I was working mostly with the producers and the writers, but mostly with the writers, how we would do it at SNL, getting the sketches to as great of a place as possible, at which point we would share them with Mulaney, and then we would get his notes and go back and address his feedback.

But yeah, I mean, John's an incredibly creative and talented person. He always has his own take on things. He never wants to do things the standard, traditional expected way. Even as I was working on the show with him, I was like, what is this show? I think all of us were coming from an SNL background, he's just like, it's not SNL, it's not a typical late night show. It's going to have its own pace, its own feeling, its own vibe.

I honestly don't think it was until I was watching the first episode live that I really understood what the show was. At that point I was like, oh, this is what we've been making. I love it. I'm so happy that this is what we've been making.

But for John, it was more important that the sketches be interesting than it was that they'd be hard laughs. He would almost walk away from some of the harder jokes in some of the sketches in favor of playing into weirdness, awkwardness, unexpected, surprising stuff. So that was really an interesting process too.

He also likes things to play longer than they would on SNL, to let it breathe. It doesn't have to be a zing, zing, zing. The way we're used to seeing it, it can be a little more patient. As an editor, it was a challenge to help create a tone for a show that I'd never seen before.

NFS: I always like to wrap up and do the classic NFS advice column. Any advice for comedy editors in particular?

One thing I really like to do is when I'm watching dailies, I always put a marker on anything that makes me laugh out loud.

I put little stars by it, write "funny" if it really makes me laugh, because when you've seen something a thousand times, it doesn't feel funny anymore. It doesn't feel fresh anymore. But you have to keep that in mind, what it felt like the first time you saw it. And I really do hold onto those initial reactions and try to bring those forward with me throughout the edit process so that I can maintain a fresh eye.

I've definitely worked on things where you've watched it too many times and then you watch an alt that isn't quite as funny as the original take, but because you haven't seen it, then all of a sudden it feels fresh. So everyone is laughing. It's like, why didn't we use that? Let's put that in. And then you swap in a slightly less funny joke and swap out the more funny joke just because you, as someone who's seen it a hundred times, is more surprised by it in that moment.

I try to always keep in mind what my gut reaction is and not get swayed by over.