The number of cool events taking place this weekend in Hollywood at the 2013 Turner Classic Movies (TCM) Film Festival is head-spinning.

Saturday alone, there’s Jane Fonda getting her hand and footprints done at the Chinese Theatre; Ms. Fonda making an appearance at the screening of On Golden Pond; and more. For example, two hours before SNL usually cold-opens on the east coast, there is also this 6:30 p.m. PT event: a screening of the classic Western Shane introduced by Bill Hader.

Hader is getting ready to host his third season of Essentials Jr. in June and also jumped in last fall as a TCM guest programmer. The four movies he picked for viewers in September included efforts by Billy Wilder and Akiro Kurosawa.

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For the first time since Eddie Murphy in 1983, a Saturday Night Live performer has been nominated at the Primetime Emmys in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Before Bill Hader finds out if he’ll take home the prize, he chatted with Elvis Mitchell for today’s episode of TheTreatment on KCRW.

There’s lots of good stuff about the mysteries of why some SNL skits work and other celebrity hosts don’t, even when they’re killing it in studio. Hader also talks about his admiration for comedians who remained calm amidst the craziness, like Harvey Korman, Gene Wilder and SCTV’s Rick Moranis. In that same vein, he also isolated a formative childhood viewing experience:

“Watching Monty Python and the movie And Now For Something Completely Different in the sketch where John Cleese is the guy teaching people how to defend themselves if anyone attacks with fresh fruit. And the way he plays that is as a real insane person. He doesn’t play it funny, at all. There’s a moment where everyone is listing off – ‘You’ve already told us how to defend us against cherries…’ – but it’s so funny, there’s just a shot of him listening to them and he’s playing it as a psychopath. And that, at a young age, I realized, ‘Oh, that’s what makes it so much funnier.’”

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SNL cast member Bill Hader has told this story at least a couple of times, last spring on “Kevin & Bean” and currently via Bill Simmons’ The B.S. Report. It’s definitely a keeper.

During his first few seasons on the NBC show, Hader would spend Sunday mornings surfing the Internet and reading his worst critics. One of the most notable pans took the form of a long April 2006 blog post titled “The Ballad of SNL’s Bill Hader.”

As Hader tells it, he was in LA the following year for some Superbad re-shoots and found himself being driven by a friend of his roommate’s from the days when he lived here and worked as a PA. During the drive, that mutual acquaintance accidentally revealed himself to be the author of the blog post. Per Hader:

“As we’re talking, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I run this website, it’s called blah blah’… And I go, ‘How do I know that name, and I’m like, oh, that’s the affiliate of…’ Do you know this thing called “Ballad of Bill Hader”? And he’s just silent.”

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Ben Mankiewicz of The Young Turks and AMC fame is now just a cog in a series of Bill Hader characters. Wow – Mankiewicz was parodied on SNL! We asked Ben what it feels like to be the Christine O’Donnell of TYT. “Seeing yourself spoofed on SNL is surreal,” the host tells FBLA. “Everybody thinks it’s great…but my mother. She asked, ‘Being parodied on TV does that make you a joke?’”

Relax Mrs. Mankiewicz, your son is still serious basic cable and Internet show host. But he does now have pretty stellar pick up line. Our suggestion: “Don’t be a hater ’cause I was played by Bill Hader!” Ahem.