Doing some searching I found a video and a website for a real DeAndre Cole who has a show called What Up With That?. I had assumed that the SNL sketch was purely made up and not parodying anything real. It appears though that hardly anyone else knows this. The Wikipedia entry for the SNL sketches make no mention of what they are parodying. Furthermore, there don’t seem to be many other mentions of the real person and show on the Internet. The Talk page on the Wikipedia entry explicitly says that it’s not a parody of anything real. So what’s the truth here?
I don’t think that’s the same guy in your first two links. The first one looks like a religious program’s ripoff of the SNL sketch. The second link appears to be an obscure musician with a similar name.
I’m not sure if the two real DeAndre Coles are the same person or not. Note that the video is from 2011. The second link probably has recent photographs of the person it’s about. It’s possible that the person has changed somewhat in ten years.
For about the first two minutes I was wondering if this was some kind of Evangelical Christian knock-off of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” complete with a Drew Carey lookalike in the red shirt but usually they can afford more than wobbly stools on what appears to be a half-empty community center hastily filled up with props clearly salvaged from some abandoned mall. The video is on a channel associated with the “Rhema Bible Church” which is an “Accredited Bible College”, although who extended them accreditation and for what are questions to remain unanswered (and I mean that in the sense that I actually don’t want to know the answers rather than I just lack enough give-a-fuck to research them).
What Evangelicals find entertaining is frequently bizarre in a “Albanian Ministry of Cultural Education” sort of way except with quoted-out-of-context Biblical passages standing in for “Shit Stalin Said”, but whether this is a parody of a satire, or what is unclear. I feel like the host missed the boat in not ending with, “Sorry we didn’t have time for Randy Quaid” in some kind of Kimmel-esque attempt to create a faux rivalry with a sort-of celebrity that the audience would recognize but I’m probably expecting too much sophistication in expecting that they could even rise to that base level of imitation.
And not a half-bad one at that. The DeAndre Cole character is maybe even better than Kenan’s. But the dancing tracksuit guy is a poor replacment for Sudeikis.
It’s almost a note for note, beat for beat, word for word recreation of the sketch. You’d think a person would want to do something to put es own stamp on it. What’s the point of recreating an SNL sketch so precisely? It’s like what high school kids do.
