Chris Kattan

Christopher Lee Kattan was born on October 19, 1970, in Culver City, California, to actor and voice artist Kip King, born Jerome Kattan, whose own parents were Jewish immigrants from Iraq and Poland, and Hajnalka Biro, a Budapest-born model and Buddhist who had worked in London. Kattan was raised on a Zen retreat on Mount San Antonio outside Los Angeles before relocating with his mother to Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he attended and graduated from Bainbridge High School in 1989. His stepfather was a Buddhist therapist and monk, and his half-brother, Andrew Joslyn, works as a professional musician and composer.

Before achieving national recognition, Kattan trained and performed with multiple improvisational and sketch comedy troupes in Los Angeles, among them The Groundlings, an organization of which his father had been an original member. In 1996, Kattan moved to New York City to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, where he remained a regular cast member through 2003. During those seven seasons, he developed a range of recurring characters, including Mr. Peepers, Mango, Azrael Abyss, Kyle DeMarco of the DeMarco Brothers, and Gay Hitler. His most widely recognized work on the program was his portrayal of one half of the Butabi Brothers alongside fellow cast member and Groundlings alumnus Will Ferrell, a duo defined by their signature head-bobbing movement. Kattan also performed celebrity impersonations on the show, taking on figures including Antonio Banderas, Al Pacino, David Lee Roth, Paul Shaffer, Steve Irwin, Ricky Martin, Robert Downey Jr., and Queen Elizabeth II, among many others.

Kattan and Ferrell extended the Butabi Brothers characters into the 1998 feature film A Night at the Roxbury. During his tenure at Saturday Night Live, Kattan also appeared in the films House on Haunted Hill (1999), Monkeybone (2001), Corky Romano (2001), and Undercover Brother (2002).

In 2004, Kattan made his Broadway debut in Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, playing the role of Xanthias. He was subsequently replaced in the role by Roger Bart.

Following his departure from Saturday Night Live, Kattan continued working across film and television. In August 2009, he starred in the Independent Film Channel miniseries Bollywood Hero, portraying a fictionalized version of himself navigating a career transition from comic actor to leading man. That same year, he joined the cast of the ABC sitcom The Middle, playing Bob, a coworker of the character Frankie Heck at Mr. Ehlert's car dealership, a role he held from 2009 through 2014. He also appeared on How I Met Your Mother, playing himself portraying a fictional villain named Jed Mosely in a movie-within-the-show called The Wedding Bride, and reprised the character in a sequel episode. In 2008, Kattan appeared in a Diet Pepsi Max commercial broadcast during Super Bowl XLII, which featured the song "What Is Love" and incorporated the Butabi Brothers head-bob.

Kattan returned to Saturday Night Live as a guest on the program's Christmas episode on December 17, 2011, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, and made a brief appearance on the final episode of the show's 37th season. On December 18, 2018, he reunited with SNL alumni Jimmy Fallon, Horatio Sanz, and Tracy Morgan for a cold open on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, joined by Ariana Grande, in a reprisal of their performance of "I Wish it Was Christmas Today," marking the first time all four had performed the song together since 2011.

In 2014, Kattan reprised his SNL character Mango in a preview for Sharaya J's music video "Shut It Down," produced as part of a fashion campaign by Alexander Wang. His voice work includes the character Kakie, a cake monster, in the 2015 animated film Hotel Transylvania 2, and the title role in the Cartoon Network and Boomerang animated series Bunnicula, which ran from 2016 to 2018. In 2023, he provided the voice of Alligator #1 in the animated film Leo.

In 2017, Kattan competed on season 24 of Dancing with the Stars, paired with professional dancer Witney Carson, and was the first celebrity eliminated. Following the competition, Kattan disclosed that he had broken his neck approximately fourteen years earlier while performing a stunt during an SNL sketch parodying The Golden Girls, in which he threw himself backward onto a chair. He subsequently underwent five surgeries, two of which were paid for by NBC, and has experienced impaired mobility since the injury. Kattan acknowledged that pain medication taken following his fourth surgery contributed to a DUI arrest in 2014. In 2022, he competed as a houseguest on the third season of Celebrity Big Brother.

Kattan published a memoir in 2019, titled Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live, written with Travis Thrasher and released by BenBella Books, which addressed the on-set accident and its aftermath. On a personal note, Kattan married model Sunshine Deia Tutt on June 28, 2008, in Oakhurst, California, following a Christmas Eve 2006 proposal. The couple separated 44 days after the wedding and divorced in February 2009. In March 2023, Kattan proposed to writer and former on-air personality Maria Libri at a Wilco concert at the Riviera Theatre, while the band performed "I'm the Man Who Loves You." Kattan and Libri had met eighteen months prior at a stand-up comedy show Kattan was performing at Boondocks Pub in Springfield, and have since collaborated on writing projects including a romantic comedy, as well as appearing together on the YouTube channel Hey Kattan!