Colin Jost and Michael Che Were ‘Haunted’ by This Year’s Weekend Update Joke-Swap
As is tradition, the final installment of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update for 2024 found fake news anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che penning horrifically offensive jokes for each other to read on camera.
The Christmas joke swap seemed even more brutal this year than ever before, even if that brutality was also conspicuously contrived. It’s not enough to simply force Jost to make crude jokes about his famous wife, Scarlett Johansson, anymore — this time there had to be a camera set-up to capture her live reaction to the segment. Ancient Rome had gladiator fights, and 21st century America has this, I guess:
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Most of us would assume that these cringeworthy gags don’t have much of an effect on Che and Jost. After all, despite their apparent on-screen embarrassment, the duo willingly agree to participate in this segment year after year, even if it means kicking off the holiday season by giggling through increasingly upsetting racist and sexist pseudo-jokes, sometimes in front of 100 percent fictional Civil Rights heroes.
Che and Jost have been doing these joke swaps for nearly a decade, surely they must be totally desensitized to them by this point, right?
Well, not necessarily.
On the latest episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, the hosts discussed the recent holiday installment of SNL, and specifically, the particularly vicious Weekend Update bit. “This is not a modern SNL rewatch podcast,” Meyers noted, “(but) I will say (that) the holiday joke swap between Che and Jost was really something to see.”
“They were going hard,” Andy Samberg agreed, adding that Jost “really got the worst side of it this year.”
Meyers admitted that watching the joke swap made him feel “stressed” as if he were “falling off a building.” And he revealed that Che and Jost seemed similarly shaken up afterwards. “I texted them together and said: ‘That was incredible. That was the most incredible six minutes of television,’” Meyers recalled. “And both of them wrote back in a way that made it clear they were haunted by the experience.”
How exactly were they haunted? “It wasn’t, ‘Ha ha, yeah man, how rad was that?’” Meyers continued. “Jost said: ‘My heart is still pounding.’ And it was a full day and a half later.”
While the segment may have taken a bigger psychological toll on Che and Jost than we realized, judging from the staggering amount of online attention that it’s received this year, the joke swap will likely continue until audiences get sick of it — or someone literally dies of embarrassment.
