Before They Were SNLers: Colin Jost On The Weakest Link

What do Pink, Christie Brinkley, Kent State, and Australia have in common? They all stumped a 20 year-old Colin Jost on The Weakest Link.

Before his time at the “Weekend Update” desk, the Saturday Night Live star pulled out a modest win on the syndicated version of the early 2000s game show—and LateNighter has unearthed the footage. (Scroll to the bottom of this post to watch it for yourself.)

Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Monday night, Jost revealed that he’d been a contestant on The Weakest Link during his Harvard years. Fallon then threw to a short clip from the show, featuring Jost incorrectly guessing what season the month of August occurs in.

The episode, which aired in 2002, was part of a college student theme week, and featured a 20-year-old Jost donning Harvard gear to represent his school—something that, he told Fallon, came back to bite him when he got that question about August wrong.

“So much more humiliating when you’re wearing a Harvard sweatshirt,” he admitted. Jost recalled being the statistical weakest link for every single round of the game. “But I managed to survive until the end, and then I ran the table,” he said.

Jost doesn’t fare quite as poorly in the episode as he remembers, going 4-for-8 in the first four rounds of the show, answering mostly $250 and $500 questions. He also manages to bank $2,000 for the team.

Among those questions, though, is another incorrect answer that inspires snarky host George Gray to mock Jost.

The $5,000 question: “What woman married songwriter Billy Joel on March 23, 1985?”

Colin’s answer: A less-than-confident “Christine Taylor.”

The answer, of course, is Christie Brinkley.

“Colin. Harvard man. You popped a really nice chain there,” Gray tells Jost, adding that the Brinkley question was the “one question that was fairly spectacularly easy.”

Jost, who admits he isn’t even sure if Christine Taylor is a real person, then tries to make an excuse. “They used to be married, right?” he asks.

“No,” Gray retorts. “Because in 1985, she would have been 14.”

Despite the wrong answer, Jost manages to make it through to the final round, but not before a dramatic turn of events in which he votes off the contestant who had saved him one round earlier.

“He’s a solid dude,” a guilty Jost says of Adam, the contestant he casts off. “He’s a nice guy.”

That doesn’t prevent him from an on-air punishment: Gray makes Jost acknowledge on national television that a Harvard student couldn’t beat a student Northwestern student.

Ultimately Jost does indeed “run the table” in the final round, taking home the pot of $5,250. 

“I’m totally excited right now,” he says in a post-game interview. “I didn’t know the answer to a bunch of questions, obviously, during the round, because I’m a moron. But I eventually knew the top three, and that’s all that mattered.”

So what did Jost do with his winnings?

“We were all in a hotel, all the contestants,” he recounted to Fallon on Monday. “So I just used all the money, and we just bought beer and wine and rented a giant twenty-person hot tub.”

As if that’s not enough of a happy ending, Jost got to share the stage with Brinkley for a Hamptons performance of Celebrity Autobiography in 2016. Whether he told her about the whole “Christine Taylor incident,” we don’t know, but the two did pose for a series of very friendly selfies together.

Jost’s future on game shows got brighter, too. He now hosts Pop Culture Jeopardy! on Amazon Prime.

Watch a five-minute supercut of Jost’s 2002 Weakest Link appearance below:

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1 Comment

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  1. Martha Loy says:

    Colin Jost is one of the greatest people on this planet!! Even though he was still a young man on the game show you could tell then he was gifted and would go on to make so people laugh – thanks Colin for bringing so much joy to my life. Here’s to many more years of laughter