It was 2013 and Dan Bulla couldn’t sleep.

He had worked his way up the Chicago comedy ladder to a Saturday Night Live (SNL) showcase—a kind of pre-audition for the show hosted by local venues—and he’d just bombed. He was nearing 30 and the thought that he had blown his one chance was keeping him up.

“I had that feeling of like, this was the moment I dreamed of my whole life,” he says. “In my mind, everything is so sports based. It’s the bottom of the ninth, it’s the World Series. I’m at the plate and I struck out—are you kidding me?”

Twelve years later, Bulla, AM’07, found himself in a tuxedo, sitting at the keyboard at Studio 8H while his friend Adam Sandler sang a song they cowrote for SNL’s 50th anniversary show.

Written less than a week before, the song turned into the emotional center of the night. The star-studded studio audience gave them a standing ovation. Fans watching around the world shed tears.

After six years of working as a writer on SNL, that was Bulla’s first time on TV on the main stage.

How did an SNL fan from Darien, Illinois, go from a bombed showcase to one of American comedy’s biggest nights?

It all started about two years after finishing the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, when a coworker of Bulla’s asked him if he wanted to take a class at Second City. Bulla took to comedy writing immediately and integrated himself into Chicago’s improv community. Then, after years of working a day job as an editor and knocking around the city’s stages, he and his wife, Emily, moved to Los Angeles at the end of 2013 for her job and his dream.

“It took me a long, long time to figure out what I actually wanted to do and to admit to myself what I wanted to do,” he says. “I think part of me wanted to be a musician. I think part of me wanted to be a really literary writer. In college I made some short films, things that were funny. It was sort of a soup of aspirations.”

In 2014 Bulla landed a Los Angeles–based manager at Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Brillstein also had a client named Adam Sandler. The comedy legend had just signed a production deal with Netflix and needed writers. Sandler also needed someone to help write some songs for various gigs.

So instead of just sending a packet of writing, Bulla set out to do something original. He slowed it down and recognized that, like his showcase, this was another big at-bat in his life.

“If Adam Sandler’s looking for songs, I’ll write him a song,” Bulla says of his approach. “I know Adam Sandler’s voice—I grew up on that stuff. … So I did that and then sent this song to him through the managers. I think I sent it on a Friday and on Monday morning when they gave it to him, I got a call immediately. ‘He loves it, he wants to meet you. Can you meet him today?’”

When Bulla left that meeting, he figured at least he could tell a story about that time he played his guitar with Adam Sandler. But Bulla kept sending songs, and the next thing he knew he was writing jokes on location for one of Sandler’s movies. And then another movie and another, in various countries. He became part of Sandler’s retinue. When Sandler went on tour again, Bulla was by his side playing the keyboard.

And then another break happened. In 2019 Sandler went to host SNL for the first time since being fired in 1995. He brought Bulla with him to write.

“I really did not have any designs,” Bulla says. “I was not treating it like an audition or anything. I was just going there to have a good week and wanted the show to be amazing.”

He’s still not sure why he was offered a permanent job at SNL—he assumes Sandler suggested it to Lorne Michaels—but he moved with his wife and baby daughter to New York in the fall of 2019.

During the 2019 season, Bulla got his first sketch on the air. It was a pretaped video starring Will Ferrell and a bottle of ketchup. (You’ll have to look it up.)

That started a run of successful videos, some starring big-name celebrities and many based around songs.

Given SNL’s schedule, he’s often writing and producing a short film in less than a week, sometimes finishing up edits within minutes of the show airing.

One of Bulla’s biggest hits came last season when he did a video called “My Best Friend’s House” with Ariana Grande, which includes a very dark twist about a minute and a half in. This was also the first video that carried his own branded title card at the end.

“I don’t really get nervous too often, but … in that first minute of slow burn, I was like, ‘I think my hands are sweating.’ I was really nervous that when the turn happened nobody was going to care,” he says. “So when that got a laugh, I was probably the most relieved I’ve ever been at the show.”

Bulla shares an office with SNL performer Sarah Sherman. He thinks that no one would have pegged them as future collaborators when she joined the cast in 2021, but they found kindred spirits in each other.

“Dan has that magical ability to figure out people’s thing/vibe/energy/aura and write to the height of their ability,” Sherman wrote in an email. “That’s a very rare quality! This is why I think he would make an amazing director, but that’s a conversation for another day.”

“If he were just a great sketch writer he would be set for life, but he’s also a great songwriter and musician,” SNL cast member James Austin Johnson wrote in an email. “That sense of rhythm, of pop songwriting’s structures, feeds into everything he does. It gives each moment of his sketches drama and dynamism. It’s the secret sauce. Because he gives a damn about what makes music good, it makes his comedy even better.”

Bulla is in his second year as a supervising writer on SNL, which means he helps guide some of the newer writers during the week, but his partnership with Sandler continues. He accompanied Sandler on a national tour this past fall, which meant doing two jobs for months. Not that he’s complaining.

“If I had known that working in entertainment was a lot more achievable than I think it seemed like it was, I probably would have set my sights on that when I was 17 years old,” he says. “But I didn’t grasp that it was a thing people actually could do.”