One of the most successful TV actors of his generation by most metrics, Saturday Night Live longest-running actor Kenan Thompson has been a sketch comedy staple for over 30 years now, going back to his run on Nickelodeon's All That. But that career didn't start with him speaking French in footed bathtubs, and instead involved fake fishing and real fried chicken.
Long before taking on his stressful first SNL audition, in the relatively minimal span before before becoming a proper child star, Thompson booked a TV ad as his first paying gig. Reflecting on that pre-teen period on Richer Lives by SoFi, the actor told host Vivian Tu:
My first paycheck was a commercial for a fried chicken restaurant. It's a little on the nose for the culture, but I like fried chicken at the same time. You know what I mean? I was 12, maybe 11.
At the time, it felt like a dream come true, but in hindsight, the actor amusingly questioned the optics of a Black kid being put in the position to hock a stereotype-associated food. At the same time, good fried chicken is good fried chicken.
The Good Burger co-star said he landed a payday that, while perhaps not astounding these days, was everything to him at a young age. He continued:
So, when I actually booked it and they told me what the part was, that like I'd get to eat chicken all day or whatever, I was like, 'Yeah, this is for me'. They paid me $800, which might as well have been $10,000 to a kid.
I don't recall ever banking $800 as a kid, but I also can't imagine ever being able to spend that much money at that point in life. I'm a few years younger than Thompson, and thus wouldn't have been dealing with modern hyper-inflation ju-u-u-ust yet, so him saying he blew a lot of the money on action figures rang as true as anything. I dare not say whether or not that still holds true for me, but one glance inside my office is all it takes.
Thankfully, Kenan Thompson laid out exactly what happened in the commercial, though he didn't name the establishment. Even as someone who loves puns and can embrace purely stupid humor, though, I can only shake my head with sympathetic derision at the ad's big punchline. In his words:
It was set on a dock at a little lake, with my 'granddad,' and we were fishing together. And my line was, 'Grandpa, the fish aren't biting today.' And then he hands me a piece of chicken, and I was supposed to bite the chicken and say, 'Well, I like this kind of biting.' Classic. Classic. And I just remember the director telling me to take bigger and bigger bites of chicken. You know, felt a little racist.
I guess it doesn't seem that weird to take fried chicken as a meal while going fishing, but it seems nonintuitive to bring greasy food for an activity where holding tightly onto a fishing pole is 85% of it. Also, if I eat while I'm in the middle of a food-gathering activity like fishing, foraging or grocery shopping, I'm liable to stop doing it as soon as my hunger is sated. Why didn't that ad writer think about my feelings 30+ years later, I ask you?
Anyway, at this point in his career, he’s been able to justify SNL writers adding “Kenan reacts” in scripts rather than having specific directions laid out, so there aren’t any worries that he’ll once again be relegated to further punchlines like “I like this kind of biting.” Outside of SNL’s barrel-bottom sketches, I guess.
The effects of Thompson’s first acting gig, as it were, can still be measured this many years down the road, in the sense that he’s been a go-to spokesperson for Autotrader ads, Universal Parks, Thrifty Car Rental, Chips Ahoy!, T-Mobile, Cascade and more. (That's mostly just in the past year or two.) Not to mention hocking plenty of SNL’s fake products convincingly.
Fans can find him back in sketch mode when Saturday Night Live Season 51 returns to NBC on Saturday, January 17, with Finn Wolfhard and A$AP Rocky as the upcoming guest host and musical guest.
