SNL’s Colin Jost Has Spent 10 Years Torturing Himself for Our Amusement
When Colin Jost welcomes viewers to “Weekend Update” next week, it will make his 10th year behind that desk—a remarkable feat given that most Saturday Night Live fans didn’t think he’d last a season.
In Jost’s 2020 memoir A Very Punchable Face, he writes about an encounter he had with Chris Rock in the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, right near the end of his first full season on SNL. Rock said, “Hey! You’re still here!” in a tone that Jost couldn’t help but interpret as an incredulous, “They haven’t kicked you out of the building yet!”
There’s a good chance that wasn’t what Rock meant, but it makes sense that this is how Jost would interpret it. By May 2015, Jost’s tenure as a “Weekend Update” anchor had been a disaster. He was stiff, awkward, and came across as smug. Much was made from critics of Jost’s “permanent smirk,” which was particularly infuriating to those who considered him the “epitome of white-male mediocrity.”
