<\/p>\n
Kenan Thompson<\/a> apparently meant it when he told Jenna Bush Hager last week that it was \u201cabout time\u201d for him to move on<\/a> from his longstanding tradition of warming up Saturday Night Live<\/a><\/em>\u2019s studio audience with a rousing live performance of \u201cGimme Some Lovin,\u201d<\/a> backed over time by various other cast members.<\/p>\n For the first time in over 13 years, audience members tonight were greeted with a new song\u2014Prince<\/a>\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy\u201d\u2014performed not by Thompson, but by new cast members Tommy Brennan<\/a> and Veronika Slowikowska<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an apt choice\u2014not just as a hype song\u2014but also given Prince\u2019s 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<\/em> was the impromptu set he performed at the afterparty for the show\u2019s 40th anniversary special.<\/p>\n Following Prince\u2019s death a year later, the show put together a last-minute clip episode in his honor, hosted by Jimmy Fallon<\/a>. In it, Fallon described being on stage at the afterparty around 4:30am and daring Prince to join him. \u201cThe crowd parted (and) you see this little afro floating toward you,\u201d he recalled. <\/p>\n The show then played footage from that previously untelevised performance<\/a>. The song he was seen performing? \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n Turning over warm-up duty to fresher cast members has become a regular part of the show\u2019s 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<\/a> and Taran Killam<\/a>. He continued with Killam as a duo after Armisen left the show, and had been going solo since Killam\u2019s departure in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source latenighter.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before and After (Photos: NBC) Kenan Thompson apparently meant it when he told Jenna Bush Hager last week that it was \u201cabout time\u201d for him to move on from his longstanding tradition of warming up Saturday Night Live\u2019s studio audience with a rousing live performance of \u201cGimme Some Lovin,\u201d backed over time by various other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2240342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[23571,352939,21846,21890,360674,360670],"class_list":["post-2240341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-jimmy-fallon","tag-kenan-thompson","tag-prince","tag-saturday-night-live","tag-tommy-brennan","tag-veronika-slowikowska"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/After-More-than-a-Decade-SNL-Audiences-Get-a-New.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2240343,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240341\/revisions\/2240343"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2240342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}