Kenan Thompson apparently meant it when he told Jenna Bush Hager last week that it was “about time” for him to move on from his longstanding tradition of warming up Saturday Night Live’s studio audience with a rousing live performance of “Gimme Some Lovin,” backed over time by various other cast members.
For the first time in over 13 years, audience members tonight were greeted with a new song—Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”—performed not by Thompson, but by new cast members Tommy Brennan and Veronika Slowikowska.
It’s an apt choice—not just as a hype song—but also given Prince’s history with the show. All told, he appeared as musical guest four times between 1981 and 2014, but what may have endeared him most to people who worked on SNL was the impromptu set he performed at the afterparty for the show’s 40th anniversary special.
Following Prince’s death a year later, the show put together a last-minute clip episode in his honor, hosted by Jimmy Fallon. In it, Fallon described being on stage at the afterparty around 4:30am and daring Prince to join him. “The crowd parted (and) you see this little afro floating toward you,” he recalled.
The show then played footage from that previously untelevised performance. The song he was seen performing? “Let’s Go Crazy.”
Turning over warm-up duty to fresher cast members has become a regular part of the show’s tradition. When Thompson first joined the cast, it was Fallon who was in charge of revving up the crowd. In the fall of 2012, Thompson began performing alongside Fred Armisen and Taran Killam. He continued with Killam as a duo after Armisen left the show, and had been going solo since Killam’s departure in 2016.
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