Auguste White, whose work on Saturday Night Live earned her five Emmy nominations and a writing win for SNL’s 50th-anniversary special, found her comedic voice by doing the opposite of what she was “supposed” to do. The Virginia native attended the elite Andover boarding school and then Yale, planning to be a doctor.
"I had to break every rule I learned," says White, who started at SNL as one of its youngest female writers ever, at 23. (She’s 27 now.) “When you’re a little Black girl at those schools, your goal is to fit in. Too much attention can be scary. I had to get comfortable with, ‘What if I walked away from perfection and toward something that excites me? What if I didn’t always say the right thing?’ I had to take a risk and get weirder.”
She describes her voice as “the girl next door who’s actually the monster under your bed” — exemplified in SNL sketches like “Jumanji,” which had Kristen Wiig ruining a dinner party with her board-game meltdown. One of White’s Emmy noms was for Maya Rudolph’s Mother’s Day 2024 monologue — 2.3 million YouTube views and counting — which had Rudolph rapping and spitting lines like “Mother is mothering!” “My comedy is breaking through that well-behaved, straight-A-student exterior with weird, freaky shit. I like my characters to be in small containers and ask big, crazy questions.”
Erika Alexander and Tracy Morgan in a scene from The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins
Post-SNL, White's zany sensibility led her to The Sex Lives of College Girls (HBO Max) and then The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins (NBC), Robert Carlock and Sam Means’s sitcom starring Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe. In both shows, characters wrestle with questions about destiny, purpose and their place in the world — a theme that’s shaped her own life and career.
"When I decided to be a comedy writer, it was after my mom passed away,” White says. “Six months later, Covid hit. Everything I thought I knew just fell away. I asked myself, ‘What do I want to do?’ The answer was: laugh, and be around people who are funny. I’m going to laugh until y’all put me in the ground.” She also does stand-up, writes poetry and will direct her first feature soon. “At the heart of all those experiences, it’s been, ‘Did I do what I wanted to do, which is to make people laugh?’ I can say yes, and I’m very grateful for that.”
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #8, 2026, under the title, "Laughing Matters."
