Steve Higgins
Steve Higgins is an actor, born 1963.
For most of his career Steve Higgins has sat one seat to the side of the person the show is named after. He has written and produced for Saturday Night Live since 1995, announced Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from 2009 to 2014, and moved with Fallon to The Tonight Show in 2014 as announcer and sidekick. Before any of that he was a third of the sketch trio The Higgins Boys and Gruber, who had their own series on Comedy Central from 1989 to 1991.
The job he does is harder than it looks. A late-night host needs someone whose laugh the audience trusts, who can be handed a weak bit and make it land by committing harder than the material deserves, and who can drop back into pure announcer voice the second the show needs a straight line. Higgins does all three, often in the same segment.
His screen credits away from the desk are small and mostly comic: Dean in the 2016 Ghostbusters, voice work on Doug, Matthews in Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas. Lately he turns up as himself in the institutional histories, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night and Lorne in 2026, which is what happens when you have been in the same building for thirty years.
Movies (5)
TV (4)
Where to start with Steve Higgins
The whole case for him is The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and you can sample it quickly: find any bit where a game goes wrong and watch who saves it. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is the leaner version of the same partnership, before the format got glossy, and plenty of people prefer it.
For the writing side, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is the useful one, because it puts the people who build the show on camera instead of the people who perform it, and Lorne extends that. His acted roles are a minor pleasure rather than a reason to start: Ghostbusters is the live-action one, while Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas and Doug are voice work you will recognise before you place it.