Last night, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther) hosted Saturday Night Live and impressed everyone with his comedic skills. Kaluuya, who is known for his dramatic work, threw himself into each sketch with total commitment, and you could tell he was loving his time on the iconic comedy show. And his enthusiasm was contagious, delivering one of the best episodes of an otherwise lackluster season of SNL.
But there was one sketch that, for me, stood out above the rest. That sketch, “Half Brother” saw a group of friends gathering to celebrate their friend’s (Kenan Thompson) birthday. Joining them was Kenan’s half brother Lars (Kaluuya) and his wife Jolene (Cecily Strong). The duo quickly hijack the party with an upright bass, and begin to scat and perform spoken word poetry together. Each new song devolves into more word salad nonsense and reveals that the couple are getting divorced.
The skit is hilarious on its own, but pop culture fans will recognize it immediately as a riff on ‘Yama Kippi Yay Bo’, the iconic YouTube video where Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall scats “The Little Dog’s Day” by Rupert Brooke while her then-husband Mark plays the upright bass. The video, which has been on YouTube since since February 22, 2011 (a decade!) has garnered 581,348 views. “We just have a good rhythm together, you know? He sort of feels me out, I feel him out, and uh, we go for it,” says Cattrall. The video has since attained cult status, and even after a decade in the culture, remains funnier than ever.
This video is, bar none, my absolute favorite thing on YouTube. I’ve watched it countless times, showed it to everyone I know, and every year for Halloween I fail to convince my husband to do Kim Cattrall/Mark Levinson couples cosplay. In fact, if you’re ever at my house you will likely hear one or both of us shouting “You, Jay, soffa saray!” from the next room.
The video has such a massive cult following that it even inspired its own gallery exhibit in 2017: The THNK1994 Museum Presents: Yama Kippi Yay Bo: A Celebration of Kim Cattrall.
The exhibit is described the video as, “perhaps the greatest YouTube video ever made. In this 42-second long clip we see a rare glimpse of Kim at home, is she just like us? Ordering Seamless and plowing through Netflix? She is absolutely not and how dare you think she would be.”
The irrepressible “Yama Kippi Yay Bo!” continues to inspire, and even Kim is in on the joke. In a 2019 interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Cattrall said of the video, “It was actually to promote his music and it was a very fun thing to do one afternoon in our little house, our little beach house and it spawned this kind crazy fans to watch this video.” Cattrall also acknowledge the exhibit, saying “In Brooklyn in New York they had this opening, some artist she had made some kind of painting to the music of it and the scatting, … it was very odd!” She added, “I don’t know why it’s so captured people’s imaginations.”
Wasn’t me! Hilarious 😆 #SNL
— Kim Cattrall (@KimCattrall) April 4, 2021
Glorious!
— Kim Cattrall (@KimCattrall) April 4, 2021
Long live Yamma Kippi Yay Bo, and long live Kim Cattrall. What else is there to say but You, Jay, soffa saray!
(featured image: screencap/SNL)
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