‘Saturday Night Live’ re-watch: The Jay Pharoah – Ben Carson origin story

Tonight, “Saturday Night Live” is repeating their Elizabeth Banks-hosted episode from early this season, and one of the interesting things about watching it in retrospect is how there really aren’t too many memorable sketches. The show itself was actually still rather good, but there was not really that much about it that stood out.

With that in mind, the sketch that we’re choosing to feature in the latest edition of our re-watch series is one that we find very fascinating in retrospect: Young Ben Carson, which is the introduction of the famed impersonation by Jay Pharoah. We’ve seen it many times since this episode aired, and throughout the evolution he has added a few new things to it.

In looking back at this sketch, you can see how much it has evolved. While this is still funny, most of it is based around one simple premise: Pharoah’s Carson claims that he is very angry, but often does not do a particularly great job of showing it. As a matter of fact, he is probably calmer than any other person alive.

At the end of the day, we figure that it’s very much a good thing that Pharoah has had the space on the show to play around this this impression and perfect it; given some of Carson’s recent poll numbers, we are not exactly that confident that there is going to be a lot of time for him to continue to utilize it moving forward unless he ends up in politics at some point in the future.

If you want to see some more news on “SNL,” be sure to head over here in order to learn who is hosting the February 13 installment! Also, sign up over here to book some other great TV news on everything we cover, sent right to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: NBC.)

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