2/8/08: Kenan & Kel (1996-2000)We started watching
Kenan & Kel when the show debuted—which must’ve really thrown off Nickelodeon’s demographics. It was kiddie television, but we saw a few reviews that revealed how
Kenan & Kel was structured like
The Abbott & Costello Show. Of course, none of those critics recognized the reliable format of a comedy duo coming out onstage, addressing the audience, and then going off to assorted hi-jinks.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were witnessing what many twentysomethings now think of as Nickelodeon’s Golden Age. Those younger folks have a point.
Kenan & Kel could never exist on today’s Nickelodeon channel. The network—like any corporate monolith aiming for the tweener market—is now full of bland shows with hot young babes talking like gay L.A. screenwriters. That was already the standard for network television in the ’90s, with rare exceptions like
Boy Meets World. A cable network back then was like the Wild West in comparison.
The main thing about
Kenan & Kel—also much like
The Abbott & Costello Show—is that there was never a very special episode. The two friends were typical adolescents, especially in the sense of being scheming and greedy. They’d rather put their energy into massive scams than doing honest work. Things seldom wrapped up in a neat sitcom style, either. Most episodes ended in chaos, with Kenan & Kel coming back onstage and marveling at how they’d really screwed things up that time.
Kenan & Kel also lacked any good Leftist indoctrination. Kenan had a Malcolm X poster on his bedroom wall, but that was okay. A lot of good laffs came out of a philosophy of being lazy by any means necessary. It’s still impressive to see what
Kenan & Kel managed to get onto the airwaves. For one thing, their high-school nemesis was a humorless young feminist. It’s also amazing to see Kenan & Kel trading a high-five over the body of a girl that Kenan had just knocked unconscious. Don’t worry, though. It was an accident, and they’d just prevented the young idiot from getting a tattoo.
We were also impressed to watch a recent rerun of an episode from the show’s final season, as Kenan & Kel are about to graduate from high school. Kel manages to destroy the graduation platform with a Caterpillar tractor—and any good conservative knows that Caterpillar is the greatest tractor company that’s ever existed. The series made a visionary statement with that one, but we enjoyed every episode along the way.
Make it your own: Kenan & Kel began showing as reruns on Nickelodeon’s part-time offshoot The N back in October of 2007. The N turned into a proper network at the start of 2008, and the
Kenan & Kel showtimes are listed
on the website. You don’t want your kids watching the other shows on the network, though—except for
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Kenan & Kel were, incidentally,
Kenan Thompson and
Kel Mitchell. Kenan’s father was played by horror-film veteran Ken Foree, so that’s kind of fun.
Kenan & Kel isn’t available on home video, but you can purchase the duo’s 1997 big-screen comedy
Good Burger. That’s not so much fun.
There’s also a
Seinfeld connection to all this, which brings us back to
Larry David.
