Seen at SXSW: Kenan Thompson Talks Comedy and Creativity with His #1 Fan, Chance the Rapper

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Seen at SXSW: Kenan Thompson Talks Comedy and Creativity with His #1 Fan, Chance the Rapper

There’s something so special about an interviewer who approaches the task as a true fan. The questions are different and the approach is engaging. So it was a pleasure to watch rapper, occasional comedian, and Emmy winner Chance the Rapper chat with SNL great (and fellow Emmy winner) Kenan Thompson about his career. In a bit of thematic charm, at moments he reminded me of the Chris Farley Show sketch, where the titular host was just too excited to ask anything of substance. However, they did have a good and far-reaching conversation about work ethic, coming into the comedic craft, and how fatherhood impacts their work.

Kenan had been in the works for longer than most of us knew.
The notable headline for Kenan Thompson at the moment has been “filming a sitcom during the week in LA, flying to New York to tape SNL on weekends.” But Thompson points out, the first part of the puzzle had been in the works for a while. Calling his show a “natural progression for moving on from SNL,” he admitted that the development process started about eight years ago, and this is actually the third concept he had for such a project.

This version started coming together about three years ago with the show’s creator Jackie Clarke, and it continued to evolve, bringing on an additional showrunner (David Caspe, also working on Showtime’s Black Monday) and adapting to surround him with comedians (including Fortune Feimster, Broadway’s Taylor Louderman, Kimrie Lewis, and fellow SNL cast member Chris Redd). He spoke warmly of getting to round out that cast with “the GOAT Don Johnson” and his TV daughters Dani and Dannah Lane, who he called “the sweetest little girls ever to be discovered.”

Kenan’s origins with Nickelodeon were an invaluable training ground.
As Chance sung the praises of Kenan as a child actor and budding comedian, Thompson agreed that the channel was a fertile training ground on multiple fronts. Moving from sketch to sitcom was easier for him…because he’s done it before, with the pivot from the sketch-based All That to the multi-cam sitcom Kenan and Kel. But where he did have to adapt was in the move from a live audience, to a more self-contained production. “When you have an audience they can tell you when to stretch, or when to go the other way” he pointed out, “but when there’s no audience, it’s really more about the writing.”

Kenan also opened up about the worries he had about moving from that role as a child actor to a more mature performer. At the time he was making that transition, it hadn’t been executed successfully that often. He even had a strong example of the worst case scenario in his life: “Jaleel (White, of Family Matters) fame is one of my dearest friends in the world, and I watched what he lived through.” So to see his ability to go from stages at Nickelodeon Studios to the stages at Studio 8H, and in a record-setting capacity? It felt not only rewarding, but also improbable.

We should probably be taking Chance the Rapper, The Comedian more seriously.
As any good moderator does, Chance did a great job keeping the focus on his subject, detouring only once to share a story of his first time on SNL. He stopped by 8H on a day he wasn’t scheduled to be there, only to be turned away by security – “they didn’t want some 19 year old just hanging around, like ‘how’s this work?’” But Thompson and Leslie Jones managed to intervene before he was kicked out, and they hung out chatting. The pair encouraged him to really contribute when his time came. He listened, and came back for his second appearance with sketches to share.

Kenan was quick to interject: “you didn’t just bring sketches, you crushed, man! You brought three sketches and we used them all!” From there, we got to see more of Chance with each passing appearance on the show – including two Emmy nominated numbers, one of which went on to win!

Both Kenan and Chance keep an additional role close to their hearts these days: father.
“When I was a single man, my stories only reflected on me,” Thompson said about how his choices have changed since becoming a father, a question Chance made sure to ask him as he considers his own life as a father of two young girls. “Now, they reflect on my family too […] I wanna embrace the beauty of it.” The trajectory of his career moves with them in mind, and also with the idea of “moving the culture forward.” In his words, “it’s that juggle.” Chance agreed: “it’s 100% that juggle.”

It seems like it could be daunting to keep all of this in mind, but as with so many of us, he was able to rethink a great deal of it when the pandemic hit. “Before [it], I was booking and overbooking myself, and I would have missed a year of my kids’ lives. I’m trying to take the blessing from it.”

Now that Kenan has finished filming its first season and the cross-country flights can slow for the time being, the headlines can focus on his performances in both projects. And it sounds as though we should keep an eye out for more Chance on SNL – as the pair parted, Kenan made sure to get one final nudge of “please keep doing the sketches, man” in to his friend and mentee.

Kenan airs Tuesday nights at 8:30pm ET on NBC, while SNL returns with Maya Rudolph hosting on Saturday, March 27th.

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Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.
Amma Marfo
Amma Marfo
Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.