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Instead of the barren expanse that characterizes the average mogul's desk, Michaels's is cluttered with framed photos and kitschy totems—a bobblehead doll of Yankees outfielder Paul O'Neill; a Bokar Coffee can (it's the brand his mother drank) full of sharpened pencils, points up; a cut-glass canister of Tootsie Rolls (he once made a nice profit investing in the company); figurines of Bing Crosby and the Buddha; a green-shaded banker's lamp; and a promotional cardboard desk calendar for Broadway Video (its jagged- skyline design has not changed since 1979). The effect is part English club, part dorm room. Somewhere within reach of the desk is always a paper towel-lined basket full of freshly made popcorn, a habit picked up when he quit smoking in the eighties. The upholstered furniture is mostly refurbished Art Deco—all bulbous curves. A fish tank bubbles in a corner. On the wall are photographs by William Wegman, including a shot of one of his Weimaraners. A framed photo of a short man alongside a tall man in uniform, standing by a Lincoln Continental, commemorates the time in the eighties when Michaels and his friend Paul Simon got pulled over outside Memphis with a joint in the car, and the state trooper, a fan of Graceland, asked not for license and registration, but for an autograph. (Michaels stepped away from the vehicle to snap the photo.) Along one wall is a long bulletin board striped with columns of color-coded index cards. This is where the elements of each week's show get assembled and disassembled and assembled again. Above the board hangs an engraved plaque that Rosie Shuster, Michaels's first wife and a writer on SNL's early seasons, stumbled on in a West Village antiques shop in the seventies: THE CAPTAIN'S WORD IS LAW.

Once everyone settled, Michaels started the meeting: "This is Jonah Hill," he announced, and the supplicants applauded and whooped. Hill gave a small wave. A veteran, he wasn't cowed. (When you host the first time, Jon Hamm says, "you're assaulted by the history of the show.") Hill would not pitch any ideas that day, although hosts sometimes do. Christopher Walken had a memorable suggestion, in 2008: "Ape suits are funny," he told the room, in his flat Queens accent. After a pause, he added, "Bears as well."

"Beck!" Michaels barked, notifying Beck Bennett, a handsome cast member known for playing Mike Pence, that he would go first.

"Hi, Jonah," Bennett said from the arm of a couch. "Uh, how about if you're a guy who's into karate classes, but you don't have anyone to talk to about it? So you go to a doctor's waiting room and you pretend to fill out forms and you go, 'Hey, man, is your sensei riding your ass this week?'" Laughter in the room, including from Michaels. Good start.

Next he called on Aidy Bryant, a bubbly brunette with a daffy streak.

"Hiii," she said. "So maybe we're in couples therapy, and the therapist is like, 'Why don't you both say why you fell in love with each other?' And I'm like, 'Because of his big heart.' And you go, 'Because of her feet.'" More laughs.

Kenward, the producer, was up: "HBO says all of its shows now have to have intimacy coordinators, sort of like animal trainers for sex scenes. So I thought you could be one of those."

Each pitch placed Hill at the center of a comic scene. But the exercise is largely ceremonial. It's rare for an idea floated on Monday to make it to air on Saturday night, or even to be written up as a script. If an idea were to elicit big laughs on Monday, it could lose its combustive force by Wednesday afternoon, when forty or so sketches are read aloud around a big table. The writers save their best stuff for the read-through. The Monday gathering is more like a session of speed stand-up, with the comics sitting down. The idea is to make the host laugh, to instill confidence that this roomful of the comedy-elect will provide a safety net.

Alex Moffat, a Chicago-born actor who was the show's Eric Trump, proposed a commercial parody pegged to the Red Sox's World Series victory the previous evening: celebratory boozing had created an epidemic of erectile dysfunction in Boston. The solution: "Jonah Hill's bonah pills." People groaned, and someone weakly said, "Well done." (Wordplay is viewed as a low-grade, if irresistible, form of humor.)

The pitches kept coming:

"Maybe you're a high-powered attorney in a big trial, but you keep accidentally calling the judge 'Mom.'"

"You play a guy who's really into pornography, but your one complaint is...Why they gotta cuss?'

"They say that Texas has gone from being a red state to a purple state. So you play a character called Walker, Texas Community Liaison."

"Maybe you're a vampire who's decided to go vegan."

Leslie Jones, the cast member whom Michaels was hoping to mollify, was next. "Okay, um," she said, with an unsteady bravado. "We're, like, friends, and we find out that we have the same therapist, and we compete with each other trying to be the best patient." Polite chuckles. Jones picked up the ambivalence and said, "Ugh."

A writer named Michael Koman came to her aid. "Maybe Leslie's a famous ventriloquist and you're her dummy," he said to Hill. "But it turns out that you're just a guy she got her hand stuck inside." The laughs (and some "ewwwwws") had a guttural edge, reserved for gross-out material.

Next up was Pete Davidson, whose long face and sleepy eyes, peeking out from under a hoodie, gave him a monastic look, if monks had blue hair. He told about opening the door to his hotel room recently to find a room-service waiter collapsed on the floor. "He wouldn't let me help him," Davidson said. "He just kept going, 'Mr. D! Your eggs are getting cold!' " It wasn't clear whether this was a sketch idea or a tidbit from Davidson's new life as a tabloid celebrity. He had recently moved out of the $16 million apartment that he had been sharing with Ariana Grande and a pet pig, and was now "homeless," he said. (A few people exchanged glances. " 'Mr. D'? Is that a thing now?" someone murmured.)

Wedged behind a coffee table on the floor, Kate McKinnon, one of the show's stars, pushed aside a vase of hundreds of dollars' worth of peonies so that she could see Hill. '"'All right," she said in a sultry voice. "You're at a bar, hitting on people, and your line is 'I don't know if you know this...but I'm TSA-pre.' "

After everyone in the room had taken a turn, Michaels moved into his low-energy version of a coach's pep talk. "There's an election next Tuesday," he said. "People are going to be paying attention, so let's have some stuff about that. And then the rest of it will be some comedy. All right. Let's start." Everybody clapped, and Hill went off to confer with the publicity department, and to be measured for wigs.