It wouldn’t be a Saturday Night Live season finale without a “Weekend Update” joke swap, and Michael Che and Colin Jost didn’t disappoint tonight, with the two longtime co-anchors returning to the well with a new decidedly politically incorrect iteration of their longstanding bit.
In the latest installment—the 13th to date—Jost and Che once again forced each other to blindly read jokes the other had written, with this round opening on a new autistic Barbie, erectile dysfunction, and Sinners star Michael B. Jordan before escalating into Jost pledging his season’s salary to Dr. Umar Johnson’s school for Black boys and offering up his Staten island Ferry a “free one-way trip back to the motherland.”
Che, meanwhile, was made to read a string of jokes about erectile dysfunction, his boyfriend, and Michael Jackson, including one pegged to the Jackson family’s supposed presence in the audience. But as has often been the case in recent joke swaps, the night’s biggest indignity was reserved for Jost, who was forced to read a Ye/Hitler joke before Che sent out a barber and threatened to shave off his “beautiful, award-winning, world-famous hair.”
Jost, who didn’t flinch, was spared at the last second. “I was so scared,” he said as the segment ended.
First introduced as a Thanksgiving bit in 2015, the joke swap has since become a regular fixture of SNL’s Christmas episodes and season finales, trading on the anchors’ visible discomfort as they’re forced to blindly read beyond-the-pale jokes written by the other touching on race, religion, sex, and scandal.
Over the years, the segment has grown increasingly elaborate, with Che frequently putting Jost at the center of the humiliation. That has included having him read jokes about the Black community, the Catholic Church, and Woody Allen, as well as repeated jokes about his wife, Scarlett Johansson—at one point directly in front of her.
Watch Jost and Che’s latest joke swap at the top of this post.
