Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan, Will Heath/NBC), Everett Collection (Geffen Pictures, Paramount, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros.), Toei Animation, Supercell, Roblox, MrBeast via YouTube
Ask a kid who Mikey Day is and they won’t rattle off his SNL bona fides or call out his recent guest spot on Abbott Elementary. They won’t cite his work as the Dollar Rental Car spokesperson or the fact that he penned 2021’s Home Sweet Home Alone alongside longtime writing partner Streeter Seidell. Instead, they’ll point to just one thing: his role as the host of Netflix’s hit baking series Is It Cake?
“If I meet a kid and they’re between the ages of 4 and 9,” Day says, “I know they’ll have watched Is It Cake? A lot of SNL hosts with kids that age have even come to me and said, ‘I’ve got to get a picture with you at some point, because my kids love your show.’ It’s crazy.”
And it’s because of kids, Day thinks, that Is It Cake? has been able to soldier on. “I think that after season one, adults would have been like, I get the concept, I’m ready to move on. But when kids like something, they’re all in, so that’s great,” he says. “That means we get to keep doing it.”
With new holiday-themed Is It Cake? episodes hitting Netflix today — just in time for family movie nights and Thanksgiving baking marathons — we asked Day what he’s watching, playing, and reading with his 13-year-old son, Abbott.
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Everything’s so different now with the internet and streaming. I don’t know if my son has ever watched a regular TV show like how I used to. His mother and I have made a point of showing him classic movies. We’ll announce them, though, like “It’s movie night on Sunday and we’re all going to sit down for two hours and watch something,” because kids are so used to the internet and YouTube that the idea of committing to something for two hours can seem astronomical to them.
We’ve shown Back to the Future, Gremlins, The Princess Bride, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Back to the Future went over the best and we ended up showing him the entire trilogy. It’s my favorite movie so I think he was a little biased going into the first one, but he really liked it. Weirdly, though, he did say the third one was the best — I think because he liked the flying train.
I’ve also shown him clips from movies like Spaceballs, just because I mentioned it, and then he wanted to watch that.
Photo: Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
My son is really into the Jurassic Park franchise now, too, mostly because he saw Rebirth after getting into the commercials this past summer. He wants to watch all of them, but I’m trying to show them to him in the order of how good I think they are, so we started with the original after we saw the most recent one, then we went over to Jurassic World. But slowly, I think we’re going to watch them all.
My son really likes this anime called One Piece, which he found independent of me. I try to sit with him to watch stuff like that, but it’s intense. It’s just very loud. Like all the people he watches playing video games online, they just scream all the time.
I kind of missed the whole anime thing as a kid. I’m sure if I’d done it, I’d be more into it now, but he loves it.
He’s been One Piece characters for Halloween a few years in a row, too, which I love because that’s how I was with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I did try to show him the ’90s TMNT movie, which changed my life as a kid because I was so enraptured by it, but I think I tried to do it a little too young because he was pretty unimpressed. Maybe if we came back to it now he’d like it.
Photo: MrBeast via YouTube
My son is super into YouTube. So much so that he’ll ask, like, “When is Josh Plays Minecraft X1 or whatever going to host SNL?” One time, MrBeast was backstage at SNL and so I briefly introduced myself to him when I walked by. When I came home, I was like, “You know who I met? MrBeast.” On SNL you meet a lot of famous people, but for my son, when I said I met and talked to MrBeast for 30 seconds, that’s what he thought was super exciting.
We play games together sometimes, but I play a lot of console games and he’s more into mobile games. I’ve played some Roblox with him and there are certain games that I like more on there than others, but I try. We used to play Lego Ninjago together, but now he plays mobile stuff like Brawl Stars, and I’m not as into that. I feel like I’m constantly like, “Want to play this game I found?” Like there’s this one called Split Fiction, and he’ll be nice about it, but he’s also like, “I’m good.” Like, “Yeah, maybe this weekend!” He just politely puts me off.
I guess it’s understandable. He’s 13. I don’t know if I was watching a lot of stuff with my dad when I was in eighth grade.
There’s this Sesame Street book called There’s a Monster at the End of this Book that I loved as a kid that we’d read to my son all the time when he was little. I loved that.
We also had a storybook version of Back to the Future that I read him long before he saw the movie.
I tried to get him into Harry Potter, even though I never really read that as a kid, but I think we did it too early because it was just too dense. It was like “Dad, I’m 4. I’m checking out.” Maybe if we’d done it when he was a little older we might have captured his imagination, but we missed the sweet spot.
He does love to read, though. He just finished all the Hunger Games books, so that’s cool.
Photo: Paramount/Everett Collection
I used to show my son clips from Airplane! all the time, so eventually I got to the point where it was like, “All right, I’ve got to just show him the whole movie,” which he loved. He thinks it’s so funny.
There’s this other Albert Brooks movie, Defending Your Life, which I think is criminally underrated. We showed him that, which was fun, because he really liked it and it’s one of my favorite films of all time.
I think when he gets old enough, I’ll show him the British Office, which is my favorite piece of media of all time, but I don’t want to hit it too early. Maybe when he’s in high school.
Photo: Will Heath/NBC via Getty Images
Because of where I work, he’s been exposed to some sketches from SNL, but he doesn’t actively seek it out. Sometimes he’ll sit down and watch stuff, but it’s not appointment viewing. I’ll make a point of showing him stuff sometimes, like years ago we did a Mario Kart sketch with Pedro Pascal that he thought was pretty funny, and during election years he’ll watch a little more because his mom gets really into it and talks about the election a lot so he’ll know all the players involved, but I think it just hits different for him.
I used to tape Saturday Night Live off Comedy Central as a kid, when they’d show the episodes edited down to an hour and I’d be confused because at good nights people would be dressed as things that I hadn’t seen in the episodes. My son has been to the studio and everything, but I think for him, the show is just Dad’s job, and that’s fine with me.
