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Kenan Thompson is a veteran of late-night sketch comedy, but his daughters aren’t easily impressed unless his role on Saturday Night Live matches their interests.
“They get angrier when I don’t get them on their side,” he laughed while telling PEOPLE in a recent exclusive interview related to his partnership with Jim Beam. “It’s like, ‘Hey, you had Ariana Grande on the show.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, wouldn’t that be cool?'[They]are like, “I wanted to meet her.” “Okay, but I think I did pretty well, don’t you?”
Thompson, 47, added: “I get it, they’re in their own world.”
Esther Kuhn/NBC
He added that his daughters are “a little young” to watch SNL, but says they’re fans of his older work, especially the sketch “Good Burger,” and later movies starring him and Kel Mitchell. The pair rose to fame at an early age as cast members on All That in 1994, before teaming up for Kenan & Kel in 1996 and the original Good Burger movie (based on the characters from All That) in 1997.
However, Ms Thompson said that despite her daughters enjoying their father’s work, she found it easy to disassociate him from the role, saying that their father “seemed strangely very different from my persona on TV”.
“I’m pretty calm, very casual, not too explosive, grinning until something funny happens,” he says, adding, “I’m not really a joke-teller, and I’m their authoritarian type, you know what I mean? They definitely separate the two. They’re like, ‘Why aren’t you like that person?'” ”
Thompson continued, “I’m really like a bunch of different people that they never really experience. They can always see me as a person…not some kind of exaggerated human being.”
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Thompson added that it helps kids learn what’s important in pop culture. “Especially kids who are now 11 years old, they’re like the finger on every young heartbeat.”
“Like my 7-year-old, she’s still a kid, but an 11-year-old knows literally everything,” he says. “She tells me about all the football players, all the football clubs, and it’s like they know all these new artists and new songs… It’s a huge amount of stuff that they’re constantly stirring up, like the whole six or seven thing, they love it and the next day they hate it and the next day they love it and then they hate it again, it’s so funny to watch them play table tennis, there’s so much anxiety.”
