Kenan Thompson Brought Back ALL THAT's Pierre Escargot... Because of Me?
Let's just pretend my idea for Kenan to reprise his beloved '90s French character at the Olympics was totally original and suggested by no one else.
When I tweeted about Kenan Thompson and Kevin Hart’s Peacock Olympics show, I didn’t know I’d be influencing the history of sketch comedy for generations to come, gifting future documentarians with a new point on their timeline of significant cultural moments akin to the moon landing, the discovery of fire, or the invention of that cereal bowl with the straw built into it so you can suck out the milk once you’re done with the Cap’n Crunch. And yet, on August 7th, history was rewritten when Kenan reprised a long-dormant sketch character from his — my — our collective — childhood. (Was that too much?)
Here’s the deal. As any child of the ‘90s knows, Kenan was one of the original cast members on All That — Nickelodeon’s answer to Saturday Night Live. (I could write a genuine essay on the importance of that show in my life and probably on comedy in general, but that sounds like a lot of effort right now, so that’s for another day.)
One of Kenan’s recurring All That characters was “Pierre Escargot.” Donning a yellow raincoat and swim fins while lounging in a sudsy bathtub, Escargot provided viewers with “semi-educational moments” via installments of “Everyday French with Pierre Escargot.” After stumbling his way through a phrase in (mostly fake) French, he’d translate it to English to reveal its nonsensical meaning: Oh, no! The macaroni is infected.; Your balloons smell like a fine rump roast!; I will not introduce you to my fluffy dog, Boo-Boo!; May I blow my nose on your sandwich?
Well, Kenan left All That in 1999, and Pierre hasn’t been seen since. So, naturally, when it was announced that Kenan would be co-hosting an Olympics highlights show with Kevin Hart on Peacock—fittingly titled Olympic Highlights—I thought that Pierre would be right at home covering the Paris Games. Doubly so when they dropped the show’s key art, revealing Kenan in a beret.
So I tweeted this:
As you can see, I also suggested that if Kenan wasn’t going to reprise Pierre Escargot himself, he could hand off the torch (pun intended) to the injury-plagued surfing correspondent Colin Jost, who reported from Tahiti one day draped in a pool much the same way that Pierre Escargot would submerge only his midsection in the bathtub.
Alas, in the days immediately following my humble tweet, I received no reposts nor likes nor attention from streaming divisions of major media conglomerates/broadcast networks. So imagine my surprise when I was scrolling through Peacock, noticed modern-day Kenan dressed as Pierre in a thumbnail, and clicked onto the sixth episode of Olympics Highlights to discover my voice had been heard this whole time!
Here’s the segment as it played out in full, including the first new installment of Pierre Escargot to grace our screens in 25 years!!
Olympic Highlights actually resurrected the character once more in its next episode, airing another installment as an interstitial between segments. Here’s that one — the second new version of the bit you’ve seen in a quarter-century—and, given that the Games are over and Olympic Highlights has wrapped up its 8-episode run—perhaps the last ever time we’ll see the beloved Frenchman.
So there you have it: the story of how I added a chapter to the textbooks of American comedy culture. (Or, like, a footnote to a sentence to a paragraph in a chapter about kids’ sketch comedy content within a larger self-published and soon-after out-of-print textbook of American comedy.)
Bonus Vital Information: Here’s Kenan on the origins of the sketch: “It actually started as ‘Paco Delicious,’ and it was a Spanish thing. And we got a note that that was racist, so we switched it to French people… I was speaking fake French, even though they wanted me to learn the real French. But I was like, ‘It would be funnier if it was just a lot quicker and I didn’t have to focus on trying to get French right.’” (For what it’s worth, it sounds like the last few words of his French phrase were usually accurate translations.)