‘Saturday Night Live’ Fans Argue Whether Colin Jost Is Secretly Leaving the Show
If Colin Jost leaves Saturday Night Live, who will Michael Che frame for all his funniest racist jokes?
This week, Saturday Night Live announced the final slate of hosts and musical guests who will headline the final episodes of the comedy institution’s historic 50th season. On Saturday, May 17th, movie star and SNL family member by marriage Scarlett Johansson will host the Season 50 finale with hip-hop sensation Bad Bunny slotting in as the evening’s musical act, an A-list lineup that would befit the closing ceremony for the show’s half-centennial — if it weren’t just a little too convenient.
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Along with being one of the most beloved and recognizable movie stars in the world, Johansson is famously married to longtime SNL cast member and “Weekend Update” co-host Jost, and there’s a significant section of the online SNL fandom who believe that Johansson’s selection for the final hosting gig of Season 50 is less about promoting her upcoming starring role in Jurassic World: Rebirth than it is about Johansson being present for an important and bittersweet moment in her husband’s career: the final episode of his SNL tenure.
On the SNL subreddit, speculation over Jost’s possible departure from the show reached a head in a viral thread titled, “ScarJo Hosting Means Colin’s Last Show?”
“Lorne is on the record saying he wanted to keep Jost and Che around for the 2024 election cycle, it makes sense for them to stay for the remainder of Season 50, that episode will be Colin’s 200th episode behind the desk, and Che has gone on record saying he wouldn’t do Update without Colin,” one fan wrote of the lead-up to the Season 50 finale. “I know it’s all speculation at this point, and I could be wrong, but all signs point to this being a possible sendoff. If so… joke swap is going to be a bloodbath (or Che will actually for once write him a very sweet message to read).”
However, just hours later, a competing thread popped up titled, “Colin Isn’t Leaving. Scarlett Is in a Franchise Movie and Is Doing Promo for That,” in which SNL fans mocked the notion that Lorne Michaels hiring one of the most famous celebrities on the planet, who has a personal connection to the show, to host the season finale shortly before her new Jurassic Park movie comes out is too suspicious to be mere coincidence.
“Colin isn’t leaving because SNL is his career. He has been there for over 20 years,” one Jost truther argued. “The general audience knows him from Weekend Update, but he was a writer for SNL long before this. I fully believe Colin is the successor to Lorne.”
As for how Jost himself feels about his future at SNL, back in September, he told Howard Stern that he doesn’t think about it as much as the fans clearly do. “Every year you’re seeing if you still like it,” the veteran said of the decision to stick with SNL, admitting of the toll the show takes after so many seasons. “People get burned out in ways you don’t even see or you don’t know. … I think people get burned out in a different way when you have that level of heat for a while, it’s hard to keep doing it.”
Well, if a possibly departing Jost thought that his burnout was inconspicuous, the sleuths of the SNL fandom have surely proven him wrong.
