It’s been more than 20 years since Rachel Dratch first rolled out Debbie Downer during an episode of Saturday Night Live, and the character is so embedded in pop culture that you still hear everyday people refer to real life pessimists as Debbie Downers. Like all the best SNL personalities, there’s just something about her that rings so true and feels so relatable, probably because she’s based on a real-life moment that happened to Dratch.
The comedienne was recently on her former SNL co-star Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang when the subject of Debbie Downer came up. Dratch busted into the backstory, and it is absolutely wild. Apparently her therapist recommended she go on a solo vacation, and because she didn’t want to encounter honeymooners or traditional vacationers, she decided to take a trip to a really remote part of Costa Rica. While there, she encountered plenty of odd characters, and it was during a shared dinner with these bizarre strangers that she got hit with a really awkward follow-up question. Here’s a portion of the story…
The Debbie Downer story is… later, we were sitting at dinner with randos that are there, people just making chit-chat, and someone said, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘New York’ and they said, ‘Oh, were you there for 9/11?’ And it was like 3 years after 9/11. It wasn’t like it just happened. I was kind of like, ‘Ughghg… yeah.’ And then just like in Debbie Downer, it was like you had to get the conversation back.
At first, Dratch just thought it was a really uncomfortable moment, but after she got back to New York, she went to a concert and started fixating on what happened. Eventually, she came up with the idea of Debbie Downer, a woman that ruins every conversation by being as negative as possible and ruining the flow. She brought the idea to longtime SNL writer Paula Pell and together, they wrote the first draft of the iconic sketch that turned into Debbie Downer. You can watch the magic below…
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The above sketch has been watched more than 21 million times on YouTube alone and millions more across various reruns and best-of highlights. It remains the most iconic moment of Dratch’s sketch comedy career, which is saying something considering she appeared in more than 125 episodes of Saturday Night Live as a cast member and has made numerous cameos on the show in the years since she stepped away.
It’s also worth noting that the original Debbie Downer sketch works so well because it’s both really funny as a concept, and it features the cast members absolutely losing it. Everyone likes when cast members break character, but it’s the moments they break character precisely because something is so funny that truly stand the test of time and become more than just goofy footnotes. We saw that with Will Ferrell’s infamous More Cowbell sketch. We saw that with the recent Beavis and Butt-Head sketch, and Debbie Downer is another great example.
Dratch recently brought back Debbie Downer for the show’s 50th Anniversary Special. Fingers crossed it’s not the last time we see her ruin what should be a perfectly nice conversation.