Kenan Thompson

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2026

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kenan Thompson has been doing sketch comedy on TV for decades. He is the longest tenured cast member in Saturday Night Live history. Kenan recently co-wrote a book called Unfunny Bunny. He joins us to talk about why he wrote a children's book about collaboration and why after all these years he finds comfort in performing on SNL. We also get into some of his most iconic sketches including Black Jeopardy, What Up with That, and his time breaking into showbiz on All That as a teenager.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Bullseye friends, we have an incredible conversation with the great
0:03.5	Keenan Thompson coming right around the corner. All of our conversations on Bullseye are
0:08.6	supported directly by you, the folks who listen to this program. It's the Max Fund Drive.
0:15.0	It's the like 11 days a year when we ask you to join Maximum Fun and support our work directly. Go to maximum fund.org
0:25.0	slash join. You'll see all the great stuff you can get. But more than that, you will know that you are
0:31.8	supporting the work that you love. Go to maximum fund.org slash join and become a member right now.
0:39.4	Here's Keenan.
0:41.4	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn
0:42.9	is a production of maximum fun.org
0:45.6	and is distributed by NPR. It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne.
1:03.8	Since 1994, when he was 15 years old,
1:07.9	Kenan Thompson has been doing sketch comedy on TV.
1:15.1	Basically non-stop. It started on Nickelodeon.
1:21.1	Thompson was a founding cast member on the kids' comedy show, All That. There, he played characters like Superdude, Dexter from Goodberger, and Pierre Escargo, the French language educator who taught you unique French phrases
1:29.7	from his bathtub.
1:31.9	How to have played there la boule de Montecloude.
1:35.8	Hey, you, get off of my cloud.
1:39.0	Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
1:44.8	De la poodle and said, you to say, you like the pooh day, la pooh de, poor, de, and Patrick Duffy, and I'm
1:53.2	a pulde, and I see him, the night court.
1:57.8	How are you?
2:02.0	Honestly, still funny to me.
	...

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