A QUIET BRILLIANCE
Kenan Thompson has learned a thing or two during his years at SNL
NEW YORK Kenan Thompson is a sketch-comedy savant.
He’s seen how the tiniest diversion — uttering an errant word, glancing in the wrong direction, taking a half-second too long to rip off tearaway clothes — can create a disruption.
“He’s a master in that studio,” says Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels. “He knows the best way to do just about everything.”
That includes realizing how distracting it would be for the audience to know there’s a performer with a broken arm. So when the SNL star got into a bike accident on his way to work four years ago, his first thought was: “Oh my God, I have to go to the hospital, but I don’t want it to be a story.
“The writers, they work so hard, they spend all night, and then the only thing people would be mentioning would be like, ‘Did you see Kenan’s broken arm?’ That’s whack,” Thompson says. “You never know how long they’ve been incubating an idea that they got on the show that week.”
He went to an urgent care clinic, slept sitting up and, before Wednesday’s table read — during which performers run through roughly 40 sketches — Thompson called three places to find a doctor who could cast his arm discreetly and quickly.
Three days later, SNL was hosted by Donald Trump — at the time just a reality TV star, but probably still the biggest distraction in the universe. But Thompson took no chances in creating a minor one, even for a moment. He strategically propped his clothed, fractured arm on his waist, delivered his lines and no one noticed.
“Even just the smallest distraction throws off the potential of the experience of the joke,” Thompson says. “You kind of don’t have permission to not be perfect.”
Thompson, 41, is hyper-aware of camera positions, timing and the ripple effect his actions have on people just trying to do their jobs. That serious professionalism, multiple colleagues say, is the other side to what TV audiences see at home — the breeziness of a natural performer who can summon humour anywhere.
It’s a talent that puts him everywhere: as the straight man, as the bad guy, as the steady anchor in an iffy sketch centred on a rookie player. But his presence is like oxygen, not the sun. His power is essential, yet invisible; stimulating, not scorching.
“I would point to Kenan Thompson as the performer that I would watch and hope to attain that kind of confidence and ease and fun when he was performing,” says SNL alumnus Bill Hader, who struggled with severe nervousness during his time on the show. “He was like the safety net.”
Thompson, who will start his 17th season on the series in late September, occupies a rarefied place in popular culture.
He’s the longest-tenured cast member on a show famously challenging to endure, where comedy icons are moulded and tend to leave.
And although he has several other projects in the works, including a new NBC comedy due in 2020, he has no desire to walk away from SNL.
“That’s the forever plan,” Thompson says. “To never have to leave that show.”
Thompson’s approach to sketch comedy, he says, is to be just as entertained by the jokes as the audience watching at home. “Part of that is me not wanting to feel like I’m at work every single time I’m performing, because that’ll stress you out,” he says. “And that panic can just take you out of a natural, good performance.”
That aura of joy allows senior writer Bryan Tucker to write roles for Thompson that could be caustic or controversial in another person’s hands. Black Jeopardy sketches traffic lightly in racial stereotypes, but Thompson makes them “fun and gregarious.”
He can even make an imprisoned cannibal up for parole be likable. “He was just kind of adorable doing it, playing somebody who had eaten a bunch of people,” Tucker says.
Thompson, who came to SNL armed with a career’s worth of technical expertise, has since become a crucial element to the show and “the person I most rely on in the cast,” Michaels says.
Like Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman before him, Michaels says, Thompson doubles as a metronome, someone who adjusts the pace on the live show, speeding up or slowing down sketches as needed.
SNL is a high-stress environment where “you’re locked in a cage for nine months” and “all of you think you’re about to get fired,” Hader says.
“That place, it’s impossible not to close the door and bitch about people,” Hader says. “I never heard Kenan be like that. And if you did say it around Kenan, he’d be like, ‘Well, you know, they’ve got a tough job.’”
As one of the few parents on SNL — he has two young daughters with his wife, Christina Evangeline — Thompson doesn’t spend much time outside work hanging out with fellow performers. “I’m always running home to my kids.”
Meanwhile, he stands at another precipice in his acting career: Next summer he will shoot the NBC single-camera comedy The Kenan Show, which he will executive produce and star in as a widowed father of two daughters. The famously unflappable performer is nervous.
“It’s all a reflection on me,” he says. “This will be me, and everything that people see me in, in that show, needs to be enjoyable.”
The Washington Post