Nearly everyone, including several celebrities, has voiced their sorrow for the passing of Jeopardy host Alex Trebek. It has recently been announced that Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings will act as an interim host as the network searches for someone long-term. But while they scramble, Saturday Night Live fans will always have Black Jeopardy's, Darnell Hayes.
While NBC's Saturday Night Live has had its fair share of massive stars come out of the show, as well as an array of underrated ones and ones who seemingly have been there forever, but sketches like Black Jeopardy work no matter who you put in front of the camera... Well, as long as you have Kenan Thompson playing host Darnell Hayes... He seems to tie things together.
Even though the sketch appears to have been on the show forever, it's actually relatively new as opposed to SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy, which has been on for decades. Here is the inside look at the unique history of Black Jeopardy and the truth of its origins...
Bryan Tucker Was Its Creator
According to a great interview about the history of Black Jeopardy on SNL by Vulture, head writer Bryan Tucker is the man behind the creation of Black Jeopardy. Although he received a major assist from Michael Che.
"I’ve been writing at SNL for 13 years, but Black Jeopardy is probably the sketch I’m most proud of.," Bryan Tucker said to Vulture. "I am white, but during the formative times in my life, the comedians that I really enjoyed were always black."
"It worked because, well, Tucker’s not a typical white writer," Michael Che, his co-head writer said. "He’s worked on a lot of black shows. He gets that humor, so a lot of it was us just making black jokes that we knew to be true."
Bryan Tucker had the idea brewing in his head for a while. it was especially interesting to him because he wasn't part of the shared Black culture. He was even overhearing people of color speak on the street and he noticed that there was a familiarity between them that he just didn't understand. Immediately, he noticed the comedy in this.
The sketch was written on a Tuesday and it was read at the table read on Wednesday... Remarkably, it made it to the Saturday, March 29, 2014 show which was hosted by Louis C.K.
"The first draft just made Louis C.K. a confused white dude on the show," Bryan said. "But he was a little tentative about being a guy who didn’t know what the game show was about. He said, “I want to know why I’m there.” So we made him a white professor of African-American history. He thought he belonged there."
Of course, Kenan Thompson was happy to be featured so prominently in the sketch, but he did say he was trepidatious given the territory the sketch was traversing. But he was immediately convinced when he started to hear the jokes that were written for it...
It was funny right from the start and it still is.
Repetition Was Challenging But Made It Even Funnier
At first, the writers at SNL thought that writing another Black Jeopardy sketch would be like catching lightning in a bottle a second time, but they found the perfect second white 'fish out of water' in Elizabeth Banks.
Later, they found a way of flipping the sketch on its head with Tom Hanks... this might be the best version of it.
However, the one with Drake also made some unique choices...
"After Elizabeth, I couldn’t think of another way to have a clueless white person come on — until the Tom Hanks one later," Bryan Tucker explained. "But with Drake, who is Canadian, I thought it would be interesting to show a black person who had a totally different experience. I was thinking about how the contestants and Kenan are a small subset of all black Americans, lower-middle-class. And so I thought, maybe there’s something to be had with another black person with a completely different worldview."
The trickiest of all the Black Jeopardy sketches SNL has done seems to be the one that featured the late Chadwick Boseman after Black Panther was released.
"The Tom Hanks one was so successful that we were like, 'Well, let’s just retire it, we can’t really top it.' And then I think Chadwick wanted to do one," Michael Che explained. "It was also tricky because Black Panther was such an important movie, and Chadwick was very protective of the character. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t ruin the character or make it seem untrue, but also keep the integrity of the game show."
While the other Black Jeopardy sketches took two hours to write, the one for Chadwick took four to six. They had to get it just right.
Luckily, their attention to the importance of the sketch paid off as Chadwick won huge laughs from the audience, even though he played things exceptionally straight.
While there have been many Black Jeopardy sketches since 2014, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. If the writers can continue to come up with the right jokes for the right guests, this sketch will likely be around for a long time to come.