Saturday Night Live mainstay Kenan Thompson has made hay of his impression of civil rights activist, television personality, former presidential candidate, and one-time SNL host Al Sharpton for 12 seasons. On last night’s otherwise listless Russell Crowe-hosted episode, the two Sharptons faced off—or, rather, Thompson’s Sharpton faced the real Al Sharpton (as statistical analyst Charles Richards), who played off of his blustery doppelgänger with earnest good humor.
Unveiling his “black approval ratings scale” of the remaining presidential candidates, Sharpton-as-Richards got to dish out some political swipes at Hillary Clinton (7.2, but mainly because she’s married to Bill), Bernie Sanders (6.3, because “he looks like the kind of person who still calls Muhammad Ali ‘Cassius’”), Ted Cruz (2.1— “Because look at him—you just know he’s up to something”), and, finally, Donald Trump, who comes in riding a stunning -1,048 (“but it could go lower.”) As for the current president, Sharpton assured viewers that Barack Obama went up to a 22 on the 1-to-10 scale, even though he can’t explain why.
In the closing moments, he also got to call Thompson out for playing up Sharpton’s supposed penchant for malapropisms. Closing a sketch in which the fake Sharpton posited that Republican-sponsored voter ID laws are intended to “dis-en-French-fries people,” the real Sharpton asked “What’s going on with you today, Al? You’re usually a very smart person.”