Kenan Thompson has addressed Samuel L. Jackson’s recent (and jokingly presented) claim of having been banned from Saturday Night Live due to the not-used-nearly-enough word “fuck.”
As you may recall, Jackson spoke with Ellen guest host Leslie Jones back in March, notably bringing up a 2012 sketch (see below) he appeared in alongside Thompson. “Kenan got me banned from Saturday Night Live. … He didn’t cut me off soon enough and I said the forbidden word on television,” Jackson, 73, said. “He was supposed to cut me off!”
Asked about these comments during a Tonight Show interview on Thursday, as seen starting around the 3:37 mark in the video up top, Thompson noted he doesn’t “have the authority” to institute any such ban on his own. He also invited Jackson to return to SNL whenever he’d like.
“Hey, Sam. It’s all good, bro,” Thompson, 44, said. “You’re welcome any time, from what I’ve been hearing. Anyway, he dropped the f-bomb on the show but he says I was supposed to cut him off before that. But the cue card, it was just an ‘F’ on the cue card, it wasn’t like the whole word. I was thinking he was just gonna go, like, a fake move. … But he went full train at it because I guess he’s a method kind of guy.”
Speaking a bit more on the hilarious televised moment, Thompson said the first incident of profanity left him “processing” what had happened before it inevitably happened again.
“He did it twice,” the show’s longest-running cast member told Fallon. “When he did it the first time, I was processing, like, ‘Oh snap, he did it and I didn’t make it or whatever, I didn’t cut him off in time.’ That just happened. … But we kind of expect the f-word out of Sam Jackson so no harm done. But then he doubled down and said it again, and I was like, ‘Yo, my man, we gotta pay for those.’”
Closing out his remarks, Thompson reiterated his invitation to Jackson to return to the SNL stage.
“He’s been mad at me for that, so my bad, bruh, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t think he was gonna do it like that, but...come on in whenever you want. It’s Sam Jackson, who doesn’t want Sam Jackson on the show?” he said.
See Kenan Thompson’s full interview up top. Also discussed is SNL's upcoming season finale hosted by Natasha Lyonne with music by Japanese Breakfast, as well as Thompson’s recently launched Artists for Artists production company.
