In her 2011 autobiography Bossypants, Tina Fey broke down the big difference she observed between male and female comedy writers while working on Saturday Night Live. In her words, the distinction was as follows: “The men urinate in cups. And sometimes jars.” Fey went on to explain that she learned of this phenomenon early on in her SNL run after her boss, Steve Higgins (then the show’s co-head writer), acted strangely when she tried to move one of the cups he had lying around in his office. Before she even touched it, Higgins sprang out of his seat and grabbed the cup, along with a few others he had scattered about, and left the room.

Fey’s friend later informed her that the reason for his odd reaction was that he’d peed in the cups. Though she initially didn’t believe what she’d been told, before long, Fey learned that it was not only true, but other members of the staff were doing the same thing. When she expressed disgust at Higgins’s behavior to another unnamed male co-worker, the fellow writer revealed that he occasionally used cups for the same purpose. According to him, it was just what guys would do if they were too lazy to get up and go to the bathroom—a room, by the way, that wasn’t very far away at all in this case.

Tina Fey’s Most Disgusting ‘SNL’ Story Is About What Male Writers Did Instead of Walking to the Bathroom

Once Fey became aware of what was going on, she couldn’t help but notice cups in other rooms as well. One exception was the Weekend Update offices: in there, Fey pointed out, there was just a single jar of urine with a lid on it. Based on what she could see of the liquid in the jar, she suspected that either the writers were also spitting into their urine or that one of them was very sick. Furthermore, Fey recalled that you could see the jar immediately upon entering the room, and that it would sometimes be backlit by the sun shining in the window.

However, Fey did go out of her way to clarify that not all of the male SNL writers were engaging in this activity. At the end of the day, she said that it only amounted to about four or five out of the twenty men who worked there at the time. And, apparently, some of them used to enjoy pretending to rape each other on top of that. Oh, and did we mention the booger in one of the Weekend Update offices that was evidently wiped on the wall and painted over? Because that was one other bonus detail Higgins wanted Fey to be sure to include in her book.