Saturday Night Live's 10 Greatest One-Season Wonders

5. Sarah Silverman

Raunchy comedienne Sarah Silverman was a long way off from Emmy nominations and feature films like Jesus is Magic when she joined SNL as a featured player in 1994. According to legend, only one of the sketches she wrote made it to dress rehearsal, and none actually aired. Silverman also claims she was fired that season via fax, one of the harshest and coldest stories ever to emerge from Studio 8H's confines.

4. Charles Rocket

Rocket was a newcomer during SNL's disastrous '80-'81 season, the one where Lorne Michaels had departed and inexperienced producer Jean Doumanian grabbed the reins. On the season's last episode, Rocket brought a year's worth of tension to a head during the closing credits by purposely inserting the F-word into his final line. "I'd like to know who the f*ck did it," Rocket said, still in character as the shooting victim in a Dallas parody. The malicious move earned him a quick kick to the curb. Unfortunately, Rocket's post-show life is the most tragic in SNL history -- in 2005, the actor took his own life.

3. Janeane Garofalo

It's hard to write a list of greatest one-season wonders without repeatedly referencing the '94-'95 season, but Garofalo's impact during that mythical year cannot be understated. After being fed up with what she claimed was a sexist and untenable working environment, Garofalo went to the press with her anger without notifying Lorne Michaels. Longtime head writer Fred Wolf didn't do much to refute Garofalo's claims with his quotes in Live from New York, an oral history of SNL, when he said that he believed men were genetically funnier. Garofalo left the series even before the season ended.

2. Martin Short

Martin Short is one of the few who made an indelible impression on pop culture in the span of a single SNL season. If his SCTV-originated character Ed Grimley's lasting mark isn't evidence enough, his uproarious impersonations of Katharine Hepburn and Jerry Lewis -- as well as his Weekend Update fixture Nathan Thurm -- substantiate his season of hits.

1. Anthony Michael Hall

No single-season SNL veteran's tenure is more puzzling than Anthony Michael Hall's. After winning the nation's hearts in a string of John Hughes comedies, the 17-year-old actor joined the series in 1985 as its youngest cast member ever (a record that stands today). He may have enjoyed a signature character in "Craig Sundberg, Idiot Savant," but Hall's SNL legacy remains that he was cast without a lick of sketch comedy experience.

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