SNL, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Stand-up v. skits

I missed SNL this week, and so I was thinking about it. I don't know if it was supposed to be old or new. I hope it was old. I could watch the show online, but everything is broken up into skits and that gets annoying to keep pressing play every five minutes. This is the thought process I went through and then I started thinking about the homework that we have for Monday: Watch Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy, both of which were on SNL. This is good enough for my replacement television watching I guess. But anyway, I got to thinking, they had to make a pretty big transition between stand-up comedy and doing skits. How do they do it? Were they doing stand-up and the skits simultaneously? Is stand-up something you cease to do once you are on a television show and then you cease to do the television show once you star in a few movies?
My main thought process however was in making the transition. I actually was in a school play rendition of some of the old really classic skits. We just picked and chose the ones that we liked. We did some Matt Foley skits, Barbara Wa-Wa, etc. I was type-cast as the sarcastic one. If that's what a skit called for, I did it. The slightly terrifying thing about being the default sarcastic character however is the fact that you have to do a lot of monologues. It's almost like stand-up. You don't have other characters to play off of sometimes. No one to pick up a line. Nothing. Like one skit I did, my "husband" was raking leaves in the "backyard" while I had the spotlight on me admonishing his great work ethic coupled with the brain of a pigeon which equated to me, in that fictional world, having to do all the work. On the whole however, most SNL skits are not like this. Most of them have multiple actors from the show in one skit.
I did some other skits like the Matt Foley skit and I was the daughter of the couple who were trying to shape up their kids with Foley's "I live in a van down-by-the-river speech". So, in sum, I know the difference between working alone and working with other people. The latter is far easier because there's someone staring at you as if to say "your turn". The lines are shorter and you know relatively well what to expect to come next. You know what they are going to say and if they are decent actors, how they are going to say it and how you need to react. On the other hand, when doing a monologue or stand-up, you are just praying for the audience to interact with you the way that you want. You want to make them laugh at the right points and so forth, but you never really know how the night will go. I did three nights of SNL for my school play, each night some skits stayed the same and some of my skits changed so that we would get more people to come. The skits that stayed the same however, always got slightly different reactions even though I acted it out relatively the same, giving the script the same interpretation as the night before.
The two forms are sort of similar, stand-up and skits. Stand-up I think is probably much harder to do. I think if I am not mistaken, that both Rock and Murphy did stand-up before SNL. I could imagine that would be great comedic preparation for SNL. It's probably tougher.