The quiet brilliance of Thompson
SNL’s longest-tenured cast member will start his 17th season this fall
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 tear-away 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, probably 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.
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 alum 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 famously challenging show 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 had broken an arm before. In second grade, he flipped off a swing but “never cried,” recalls his mother, Ann Thompson. “Very, very stoic.”
He was that kind of kid: selfcontained, fearless and with a big imagination. He grew up in College Park, Ga., the son of a nurse and a mechanic, following his older brother, Kerwin, around, riding bikes and memorizing the lines to ’80s movies. While Kerwin sang at choir rehearsal, 4-year-old Kena n would sit on the ground and play with toy cars, dreaming up people and scenarios. When Thompson was 5, Ann enrolled him in acting classes at the urging of her friend, who saw talent in his childish play. His first role — Toto in a church production of The Wiz— had no lines, but “he absolutely stole the show,” his mother says.
He’d eventually go on to audition for 100 roles before ever booking a commercial gig. Thompson eventually was hired to review movies on a kids’ news show, which led to his role in D2: The Mighty Ducks and then Nickelodeon’s All That.
All That executive producer Brian Robbins, now president of Nickelodeon, remembers a 15-year-old Thompson walking into the audition and effortlessly performing a “crazy spot-on” Bill Cosby impression.
“Everything was easy for him comedically,” Robbins says. “I had never met someone that young so gifted and smooth comedically.”
The show, conceived as an SNL for children, debuted in 1994 and would endure as a cultural touchstone for ’80s and ’90s babies.
For the next six years, Thompson juggled several jobs, including All That and, along with castmate Kel Mitchell, the spinoff series Kenan & Kel and the Good Burger movie. During that time, Thompson honed the techniques and skills needed for being funny on camera, but he also exhibited the same spirit and work ethic he’s known for today, Robbins says.
“There was a moment there where he was one of the biggest kid stars on the planet, but he was always the same kid,” Robbins says. “He has not changed and I believe that’s part of why he has sustained for so long.” Thompson sits next to Jimmy Fallon, puts on goofy glasses and grabs a mug. They’re playing sportscasters, reciting lines generated by a game of Mad Libs they just played on The Tonight Show.
“All right, welcome back, baseball fans,” Thompson says with a whistly affect. “I’m Steve Butt.” The word “butt” comes out like a punch, drawing a laugh immediately. Thompson has been coming up with voices and facial expressions for nearly three decades. “I could’ve done that in my sleep,” Thompson later says of the bit. “I mean: prewritten and we just have to read? Reading is fundamental, kids.”
He heads to Studio 8H, where SNL shoots and, standing among the auditorium seats, looks down at the spot on centre stage where he auditioned 16 years earlier. If he didn’t get the job, Thompson thought at the time, “I’m going to be stuck in my childhood forever.”
But his 16 years “mean nothing when it comes to performing a new sketch on Saturday,” he says. “We have to earn every single laugh the same raw way, with a setup and a punchline. It never changes.”
It took several years for Thompson, who arrived at SNL in 2003, to find his footing. Then fan-favourite sketches like “What Up With That?” allowed his comedic, singing and directing chops to take centre stage. In the fake BET talk show, Thompson’s character playfully interrupts his famous guests with an increasingly elaborate theme song. “I had the best seat in the house,” says Hader, who played a silent Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham in the recurring sketch. “I would just sit and watch him sing and dance and be hilarious and switch it up.” 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 likable. “He was just kind of adorable doing it, playing somebody who had eaten a bunch of people,” Tucker says.
Thompson finally received more formal recognition last year with two Emmy nominations and one win for “Come Back, Barack,” a ’90s R&B parody music video with Chris Redd and Chance the Rapper. For the video’s rain sequence, Redd and Thompson had to stand in a torrent of water that, thanks to a technical glitch, was freezing cold. When the director asked for a third take, Redd says he wondered: Did they really need the scene? “I felt bad that I’m making this decorated sketch legend just be wet and cold.” “You know what, man?” Thompson responded, according to Redd. “We’re already wet. Let’s do this.”
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.’ ”
Thompson cites his family as the reason he was able to live most of his life in the insane world of celebrity while not succumbing to its pitfalls. Ann Thompson was a constant presence during his child acting days, working seven days straight and then spending the next seven with Thompson wherever he was filming. “You have to treat everyone with respect because you’re not a star all by yourself,” she says she’d tell him. You’re in the spotlight, but “there are a lot of people that are responsible for you being where you are.”