Growing up in Orange County, getting good at The Groundlings, going viral and more!
There's so much that many don't know about Is it Cake?
Host Mike Day!
Keep watching for all the details!
Mikey Day hails from a land known for its relative affluence: Orange County, California.
While growing up, he felt like an only child, despite having two older sisters.
There was such a significant age gap between little Mikey and his siblings that by the
time he started first grade, they were already in college.
So he found ways to keep himself entertained.
As he revealed to Yahoo! in 2022,
"I played with action figures a lot and would provide my own sound effects to their adventures."
Some of the sketches that Day has written for Saturday Night Live feature references
to his hometown.
As he explained to the Orange County Register in 2014,
"Whenever I have the chance to organically throw in an Orange County reference, I gleefully do so.
Currently on my reference wish list are Holiday Skate Center, Orange County Mining Co. restaurant
and the Cinedome movie theater – I think it closed down, but I was all about that place as a kid."
Mikey Day probably wouldn't be where he is today if not for his sixth grade teacher,
Miss Lewis.
As he admitted to the Orange County Register in 2009,
"My best friend and I had a big crush on our teacher.
She was super cute.
So we made little plays, and one of us would play our teacher, and one of us would play
everyone else."
The criteria for these class plays was to select one person from the school and imagine
them doing all sorts of goofy things.
As Day recounted,
"We'd have [Miss Lewis] do karate, because it was stupid.
It involved a lot of falling down."
The crush didn't last long, but Day had caught the theater bug.
When he moved on to high school, he ran for student body president because the student
government got to perform at school assemblies, and he wanted in.
Luckily for him, he ended up winning.
As he recounted to the Orange County Register in 2014,
"We created a bunch of weird, stupid characters.
The ones I remember most were the Techno Ninjas, these energetic ninjas who just ran around
with squirt guns to the 90s techno anthem ‘Get Ready for This.'"
Even as a teenager, Mikey Day knew that he wanted to get into comedy professionally.
The highlight of his high school experience was creating plays that made his audience laugh.
For his senior year homecoming, he made sure that the theme was Batman just so that he
and his friend could write an assembly play in which they dressed as Batman and Robin.
Whether or not his classmates enjoyed it, it proved to be a powerful learning experience
for Day.
As he revealed to the Orange County Register,
"It was a lot of fun and a great introduction to writing comedy that appeals to a wide audience.
We really wanted the whole student body to laugh, not just our friends."
After high school, Day became more serious about comedy as a potential career, so he
joined the theater program at UCLA to improve his writing skills.
But after graduating, he couldn't find a job as an actor despite going out for multiple auditions.
"Okay, we hate this now."
So Day took up various gigs like babysitting and tutoring to pay his bills.
He even had to pawn his collection of DVDs for rent money.
It took him three years after graduating to land his first TV opportunity in the form
of MTV's Wild 'n Out, with a role in the NBC sitcom Kath & Kim following soon after.
The Groundlings is a well-known improv comedy troupe that's served as the launchpad for
many popular performers, including Mikey Day.
As he told the Orange County Register in 2009,
"Every accomplishment I've had is from the Groundlings."
During Day's time with the Groundlings, his classmates included the likes of Kristen Wiig,
and he was also in the Main Company alongside Melissa McCarthy.
As he put it to Creative Screenwriting in 2016,
"You’re surrounded by many talented people all doing what you love to do [...] Really
awesome people who you get to watch, learn from, write and perform with."
According to the Groundlings' website, they get as many as 8,000 students per year and
operate in a 5,000 square-foot venue in Los Angeles.
In 2009, Day directed his first play for The Groundlings, entitled Groundlings Space Camp.
At that time, little did he know that he would eventually make his way to Saturday Night
Live, like so many other Groundlings alumni before him.
Scrolling through funny videos on your phone is absolutely normal today, but back in the
early 2000s when Mikey Day's fledgling comedy career was taking shape, it was a very different story.
So when he and his fellow Groundling Michael Naughton saw their sketch David Blaine Street
Magic break the Internet in 2006, they were a bit confused.
As Day recalled to the Orange County Register,
"I knew of YouTube, but I'd never put anything on it.
And I remember calling Naughton and I was like, 'Dude, this has 30,000 views, is this normal?'"
According to the Groundlings' website,
"'David Blaine Street Magic' [...] and its sequels [have] been viewed over 50 million
times by people all over the world, broken YouTube records, and helped launch a wave
of internet comedy videos."
Those shockingly high numbers made it clear that people were thirsty for the type of rib-tickling
comedy that the Groundlings were known for.
So in 2008, they partnered with Sony Pictures to release 50 more such videos.
Meanwhile, various TV networks also turned their focus to online comedy, thereby kickstarting
a revolution that's still cracking us up today.
Mikey Day has been a part of Saturday Night Live since 2013.
He was first hired as a writer before joining the cast three years later.
His work with the Groundlings definitely gave him some visibility, but when it comes to
his SNL job offer, he credits former cast members Nasim Pedrad and Taran Killam, whom
he knew from his time at UCLA.
According to Day, it was their recommendation that was crucial for him ending up on the
iconic sketch show.
"Guys, I booked it."
When Day got the call from SNL head writer Rob Klein, he was stunned.
As he told the Orange County Register in 2014,
"I was quiet for a few seconds and then said, 'Um, that is awesome.
Thank you.'
Then I walked around in a weird haze for the rest of the day."
The opportunity meant a lot for Day, who had grown up watching the show.
As he recalled,
"My friends and I would videotape our own Wayne's World sketches in my room.
So to work there is unreal.
It's so creatively fulfilling, and I get to work with so many talented people."
In 2016, Mikey Day wrote the screenplay for the comedy movie Brother Nature, which was
produced by SNL creator Lorne Michaels.
Michaels has produced a number of movies starring SNL alums, including one of Day's personal
favorites from his childhood.
As he admitted to Creative Screenwriting in 2016,
"I've seen Wayne's World a ridiculous amount of times.
When I was 12, I owned and wore that black Wayne's World hat."
"I was not aware of that."
Day has made brief appearances in other movies as well, including Adam Sandler's 2020 Netflix
comedy Hubie Halloween, as well as the 2019 releases Brittany Runs a Marathon and Little.
Day's parts in these particular flicks are so small that you could easily blink and miss
them, but his fans were happy to see him on the big screen even if it was just for a few minutes.
Day has also been busy behind the camera, as he co-wrote the sixth movie in the Home
Alone franchise, Home Sweet Home Alone, which came out in 2021.
And he's now busy turning the 1980s animated show Inspector Gadget into a Disney movie.
Mikey Day's career has been keeping him plenty busy, but he also makes sure to devote himself
to his family.
He and his partner, actress Paula Christensen, have been together for more than a decade.
In October 2017, Christensen wrote a heartwarming post on Instagram about their relationship,
as she gushed,
"Seven years with this gem of a human being.
Feels like less because it's still so much fun.
Feels like more, because he's my forever friend.
He has a heart of gold and makes the sun shine every day."
Day has been just as vocal about his admiration for his girlfriend, in particular for how
she's juggled the roles of homeschooling their son, cooking for the family, and keeping the
house organized, among other things during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As he put it on Instagram,
"Thank you for everything you do and for loving me, a full idiot."
Day and Christensen's son is a bit of a budding star himself, as he was featured in a 2019
episode of SNL in a parody of a Macy's commercial alongside his dad.
As Day revealed on Instagram,
"He hit his mark, took direction like a pro and was professional and polite to all the
hardworking people around him.
Plus, dude woke his ass up at 5 AM as he had a very early call time.
So very proud of this little crusher."
We're used to seeing Mikey Day wear a hoodie and rap on Wild n' Out, dance in a skeleton
costume alongside David Pumpkins, and even turn Prince Harry into the funniest person
in the room.
"AKA the Ginger of Windsor."
But when he showed up as the host of a baking show, some of us couldn't help but wonder
what attracted him to Netflix's Is it Cake?, besides the obvious reason that everybody
likes cake.
As he revealed to Yahoo! in 2022,
"I was alerted to this internet fad when I saw some video of someone cutting into a 'puppy.'"
Unless you were on an Internet detox at the time, you've surely also seen this video,
in which people cut cakes that look like puppies in front of their dogs to capture their reactions.
As Day described it,
"It was unnerving, but weirdly fascinating."
Day liked the concept of Is It Cake?, which features contestants baking cakes that look
like a wide variety of inanimate objects.
The challenge is that the cakes should look realistic enough to fool the judges.
Whoever succeeds in doing so takes home the riches in the form of $10,000 per episode.
As Day admitted to Yahoo!,
"It sounded really fun because there's that baking show element, but there's also this
play-along-at-home portion that I found super compelling.
I was definitely introduced to the artistry that goes into baking hyper-realistic cakes
through this show."
Mikey Day's duties on Is it Cake?
seem pretty simple.
It's the contestants after all who have the much more difficult task of crafting cake
replicas of random objects, a process that can take eight hours to finish.
Once the cakes are ready to go, Day then has the seemingly uncomplicated job of asking
the judges "Is it cake?" and then using the knife to find out the answer.
Alas, it's actually not that simple.
It's instead in fact somewhat complicated, as Day insisted during an appearance on
The Tonight Show.
He's instructed when exactly to cut the cake through an earpiece he wears on the show.
In addition to getting the timing right, he has to make sure the cut is perfect, as there
are no replacements.
"You just have to, like, slice it right and, like, wedge it out.
They're like, this is a standard cutting wedge, bud."
While it may sound like Day's got this under control, some fans of the show don't seem
to think so.
One of them even sent him a message on Instagram that told him he cuts cake like an 8-year-old.
And some others just aren't fans of his jokes, as they've tweeted things like,
"The Is it Cake host makes the show difficult to watch."
And,
"[Is It Cake? is] completely ruined by Mikey Day, the unfunniest presenter."
Regardless of what these haters have to say, we enjoy seeing Mikey Day branching out beyond SNL.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
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