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Jacob Kaplan has been growing a legion of loyal 44,000-plus TikTok followers with his niche brand of observational humor that revels in bizarre but universal experiences, which he spins into over-the-top characters. Take, for example, the wildly underqualified Spanish teacher who got his degree from “La Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison,” or the dad on travel day refusing to stop for lunch “I brought 47 granola bars.”

The 24-year-old Columbia University alum’s humor has opened one of the most elusive doors in comedy: Saturday Night Live, where he has worked since beginning an internship in 2017. Now a writers’ assistant, Kaplan has achieved more than most people of his job title, thanks to an role in the sketch “Kyle’s Holiday.” Below, Kaplan discusses his precocious childhood tendencies to force classmates into elaborate theatrical productions, comparisons to John Mulaney, and the only good reason people from high school should be texting nine years after graduation. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I'm curious what you were like growing up. 

I was always precocious. As a kid, I would do a thing in school where I would try to direct and put on plays with all the other kids. And they had probably a 95% fail rate. There's one successful production I did in kindergarten of Peter Pan where I directed and starred in my own devised take on it.

Now I'm imagining Peter Pan in 1968 Chicago

It was a very gritty tale. I mean, we were a few years post 9/11, so you gotta say something about it.

When did you realize the ability to make other people laugh was powerful?

I have a very type-A personality, and being in a position where you can set the tone of what activity are we going to do, or what imaginary play scenario are we going to do? At some point, it kind of clicked like, “Well, I'm not physically the biggest kid or I'm not super athletic.” There’s ways that other kids, for their own social currency, can get ahead, and I think I just realized the way I was able to get people to listen to me and pay attention was through being funny and getting them to laugh at me. 

How would you describe your comedy to someone who is unfamiliar?

I would say it's very observational. I find a lot of humor in the minutiae of daily life. For me, there's nothing better than the feeling of a super specific thing that you've observed, but realizing that everyone has also observed it, and that it's not a random thing in life, but rather “Oh yeah, this is like a total thing that we don't really think about.” I’ll text people and be like, “Is this a thing? Like, whatever it is, [a] guide jumping on the subway…have you experienced this? And if they say yes, then I'll go forward with it. I think Seth Meyers had some line about this, where he's like, “If you think it's funny, then that probably means someone else is gonna think it's funny.”

How has [working at SNL] informed your own approach to your comedy and your career?

Watching the way that sketches get rewritten, and watching the laser focus. Every joke should get scrutinized. Nothing is so precious that you can't write 40 sketches on a Tuesday night, and then by Wednesday 25 of them are never to be seen again. It definitely taught me the value of just producing work. 

How do you feel about the [John] Mulaney comparisons? I see them sometimes in your comments on TikTok.

They're very flattering. I wish I could do stand-up to the extent that he can do it. I'm happy about it. I welcome it. I want to feel, to some extent, like I am my own person. But whatever, people want to make comps.

How did you get to appear in the sketch? I imagine most writer’s assistants don’t end up in a sketch.

[“Kyle’s Holiday”] had been a sketch that they had pitched in a previous week. A friend of mine who works there had said, “Oh, you're in a sketch this week,” and I looked at it, and it was like, “Oh, my god.” So, we did it at read through, and even just getting to read lines at read through was incredible. But the sketch didn't get picked. And I thought that's the end of that. Then the Billie Eilish episode happens a couple of weeks later, and I'm told we're going to add that sketch back in. Probably 18 hours separated knowing the sketch was going to be in the show to me actually sitting down in costume doing the tape for it. 

What was the reaction like?

One of the things that I do is work the after parties, back when that was a thing. I leave the show at about 12:30 on Saturday and head over to the after party to help. I was kind of sick — it wasn't COVID. So, I was trying to get tea from this bar, just a hot tea. We were setting up for the party, the sketch had just aired, and I barely got them to play it on the TV. I was in a daze, just like on a ton of DayQuil. It was a lot of people saying things that I didn't, in the moment, have time to respond to, but it was super nice to have all that. Even if it's [texts from] random people from my high school who I haven't spoken to in nine years.