“I really want to be friends with a whale,” Mikey Day, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, said this week as he stood inside the American Museum of Natural History and discussed his favorite displays. “They just look so magical.”
“Sorry, it’s Thursday,” he continued. “I just came from work, and my brain is fried.”
In keeping with a longstanding tradition, members of the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” deep in preparations for their upcoming show, put on tuxedos and feathery gowns to join benefactors of the American Museum of Natural History for the institution’s largest annual fund-raiser, held at the museum in Manhattan.
“It’s always a nice cast bonding moment,” the “S.N.L.” cast member Bowen Yang said on a red carpet near the large dinosaur models in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda. “It’s like a perfect little reception for the new people.”
The gala was chaired by Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “S.N.L.”; his wife, Alice Barry; the writer and actress, Tina Fey, who was once the show’s head writer; and her husband, the composer Jeff Richmond.
Mr. Michaels, a longtime member of the museum’s board, is such an established supporter that in 2012, a species of daddy longlegs newly identified by a museum scientist was named the Stylocellus lornei in his honor.
“That’s how you live forever, man,” said Kenan Thompson, an “S.N.L.” cast member. “I want to find a special species of praying mantis for myself.”
