Before he was wrapping up his first season on Saturday Night Live, Jeremy Culhane was finding his footing at Texas Christian University, where late nights writing, performing and filming comedy skits helped turn a student with stage instincts into a working comic.
Culhane '14 said TCU became his creative home long before national audiences saw him on television or on stages around the country. He joined the Roach Honors College in his sophomore year, immersed himself in Senseless Acts of Comedy and the Student Film Association, and kept building bits and characters with the kind of obsessive rhythm that college can make possible. “SAC, SFA, and the Roach Honors College were pretty much my entire college experience,” he said. “I really found a way that wasn’t a fraternity lifestyle to still feel really actively involved in the school, and it was awesome.”
That involvement mattered because it gave Culhane both structure and range. He graduated from the AddRan College of Liberal Arts with a double major in philosophy and economics, a combination that mirrored the different parts of his college life: analytical in class, playful after hours. In his own telling, the honors college was not just an academic stop but a place that changed how he saw himself. “I was just so engaged with the classes that I was able to take and the level of teaching in the honors college,” he said. “It really stretched my confidence, belief in myself and thinking about the world.”
The work also went beyond campus. After graduation, Culhane and fellow TCU alumnus Grant Moore moved to Los Angeles and created the sketch group Safety Patrol, extending the same collaboration that had carried them through school. Moore said, “After college, our TCU group continued making short comedy videos for almost a decade,” a stretch that helped keep the partnership alive as Culhane moved toward bigger stages. Now, with SNL behind him for one season, the path looks less like a leap than a long climb built on repetition, teamwork and a campus ecosystem that kept giving him room to try, fail and try again.
There is also a tension in Culhane’s story that fits the best kind of comedy career: the public breakthrough came much later than the foundation. Ron Pitcock, who knew him at TCU, said national audiences are only now catching up to what campus already saw. “He is more than a comedic improv star, and I say that as someone who graded his papers,” Pitcock said. “The wit was always there; fortunately, so was the substance.”
Pitcock added, “What I remember most and loved most is the warmth Jeremy brought into every room.” That warmth, he said, was paired with a knack for making hard material feel lighter. “He has always had a way of making serious things feel approachable and light things feel meaningful.”
One of the clearest signs that Culhane was being shaped by more than performance was a course called The Nature of Giving, which asked students to use research, collaboration and public advocacy to decide how real philanthropic funding should be distributed. Culhane said, “It was so interesting to be given real money to invest into philanthropies,” and described the class as a moment when responsibility shifted onto the students themselves. “I feel like it really emboldened us to be adults in a way that I hadn't felt before. A lot of other classes were lecture-based but you're not really leading the charge. And that was the first time that it was like, ‘Nope, you are in charge.’”
That is the thread running through Culhane’s rise: the sketch work, the honors college, the philosophy and economics degree, the friendships that turned into Safety Patrol and the almost decade-long run of short videos that kept the group sharp. His first season on SNL is the latest milestone, but it is not a surprise ending. It is the result of a creative path that was already taking shape in Fort Worth years ago, and it suggests he arrived in New York with more than a résumé — he arrived with a method.
