Remember how Bill Cosby is in prison? It hasn’t been long, and yet the news cycle is so jam-packed and it moves so fast that we may have collectively forgotten. The Saturday Night Live writing staff didn’t forget, though, and that’s why we got a sketch in which the comic and TV legend-turned-convicted sexual predator is having a blast in his prison cell.
Host Seth Meyers played a new fish in prison who walks into his first cell. There he finds Kenan Thompson’s Cosby. Rather than the shellshocked, haggard Cosby we’ve seen in photos from his trials, Thompson’s version is giddy, effervescent, even dancing. He’s happily senile, and even happily losing his sight. In between brandishing a giant hoagie and a live turtle named Quincy, he tries to escape, Shawshank Redemption-style. But why? Maybe prison is the best place for Bill Cosby, for the rest of his life.
Let us now praise Kenan Thompson’s Bill Cosby impersonation. It’s first-rate. He even has the way he says “Camille” down. It’s at least as great as the impression Eddie Murphy famously did in his stand-up movie Raw.
Meyers was no blank slate. He even had some of the best lines. The finest was “Have you ever considered just dying?” By the end, he chooses solitary confinement over another minute with the star of Leonard Part Six. But we could live with Thompson’s Cosby for the rest of our lives, and moreso besides.
