Saturday Night Live: Kenan Thompson wants to stay as long as possible

At this point, you can certainly make one thing clear when it comes to Kenan Thompson and Saturday Night Live — he loves this job. He loves it so much, in fact, that he wants to stay as long as possible. He’s even willing to balance it out with both his own sitcom and also a gig on NBC’s upcoming Bring the Funny. That’s a lot for one person to take on, but clearly, the man is up for the challenge.

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In speaking on the subject of sticking around SNL in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kenan made his stance on his long-term future as clear as he could:

“Why wouldn’t I? … It’s the coolest job ever. There’s no other place like it.”

This statement is a nice little add-on to what Kenan told Ellen DeGeneres a little bit earlier this year, back when he noted that he is for sure sticking around SNL. Because his sitcom The Kenan Show isn’t premiering until midseason, that gives him a little bit more freedom to stay in his current gig and work out the schedule. Our suggestion is to make the series version of The Kenan Show film in New York, that way it’s not too much work for him to move from one gig to the next, especially since SNL has some hiatus weeks where he can cram in as much of his sitcom gig.

So why did Kenan want to take this on to go with his longstanding SNL role? In his mind, it was really all about wanting to make a dream come true and help give jobs to some other great people in the industry:

“It’s the dream … It’s every comedian’s dream to get their own show on a major network, especially one of the original three. It’s historic, mind-blowing, and very surreal. But it takes a lot of work. We shot the pilot, it was like a seven-day shoot and in the middle of that I was doing SNL. It’s a lot of work. It’s going to be an uphill battle as far as figuring out what’s working and what’s not working on an audience. That’s the advantage that SNL has: An audience will tell you pretty quickly if the joke works or not. But when you’re shooting a show on tape, you’ve got to believe your instincts, so it’s a very different process. But it’s super-exciting. I love putting people to work, so it’s crazy to me to fathom that I got Andy Garcia a job. It’s an honor.”

We do think NBC will give The Kenan Show plenty of chances to succeed, and he’s got the rare ability to promote it every single time he is on SNL — just being there is promotion in itself. He’s going to have a crazy next twelve months, but if he can pull it off, Kenan may very well cement himself as one of the most influential comedy people of the 2019-20 season.

Who do we want to see hosting SNL for the new season?

If you want to get more news on that, you can do so by heading over to the link here right now! Meanwhile, let us know what you think about Kenan staying on board both shows. (Photo: NBC.)