Book #67 of 2024:
When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown by Kenan Thompson
An entertaining if disjointed memoir from the lifelong sketch comic, currently enjoying an unprecedented third decade at Saturday Night Live. I’ll repeat that: at 21 seasons on the show and counting, author Kenan Thompson has blown past the previous record of 14 years set by former cast member Darrell Hammond back in 2009, and despite saying in this book that he might finally be leaving soon himself, he apparently has no specific departure plan that he’s ready to share just yet.
Given that degree of longevity on the program, this title is honestly a bit of a missed opportunity. Although the writer shares plenty of charming backstage anecdotes, there’s no real effort here to critique it seriously or capture how the series has changed over the course of his tenure, in a long-term view that he’d be uniquely positioned to offer. He likewise doesn’t really address the underlying question of why he’s stayed on SNL all this time, while so many other talented performers have continued to come and go from its soundstage. An introspective exploration of that topic could have been particularly interesting and insightful, but the text instead steers smoothly around it.
In its place, we’re offered the nuts and bolts of Thompson’s upbringing in Atlanta, his big break as a child actor on Nickelodeon’s All That, subsequent TV and movie projects, and ultimately, the revered late-night institution at NBC. The amount of celebrity name-dropping is unavoidable / expected in a work like this, and it’s neat to learn about the comedy touchstones that Kenan idolized and how they influenced his own approach to the business, not to mention the difficulties he faced as a short Black kid “on the rounder side of things” in an industry so focused on biased superficial beauty standards. We also hear some about his two daughters and his philosophies on parenting them — inspired heavily by the peers he’s lost to gun violence, drug abuse, and suicide — as well as his complicated feelings on Bill Cosby, whose squeaky-clean comedic persona was so formative for the young man before all his horrendous sex crimes came to light. (And a weird focus on the zodiac, too. The author doesn’t list the astrological sign of every single person he mentions, but he includes way more of them than you’d think and seems to genuinely believe they’re indicative of people’s behavioral patterns or something.)
Anyway. Not a bad read overall, but nothing too exceptional, either.
★★★☆☆
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