In defense of Black Jeopardy

Published February 18, 2025 3:46pm ET



Saturday Night Live is often afflicted with horribly biased and unfunny sketches. But Kenan Thompson’s recurring Black Jeopardy isn’t one of them, and conservatives outraged by Tom Hanks’s appearance on the sketch during the show’s 50th-anniversary special need to get over themselves.

If you watch just the Hanks appearance from Sunday and are ignorant about the original sketch from eight years ago, I can see how an overly sensitive person might get offended. Six minutes into a seven-minute, 20-second sketch, Hanks has a brief cameo as Doug, an elderly white man wearing a MAGA hat with a rural accent.

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