It’s not an SNL closer unless there’s a Joke Swap. The time-honored Weekend Update tradition sees co-anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che trading jabs they wrote for each other. In no-holds-barred bits from the past, everything — and everyone — is game, including Jost’s wife, two-time Oscar-nominated actress Scarlett Johansson, and the late-nighter’s trusty steward himself, Lorne Michaels.
This time around, the casualty was not a person, so much as a prized possession: Jost’s “award-winning” hair. After trading provocative jokes (see the highlights below), Che goaded Jost into reading out a particularly offensive one — “Ye can make awful music, but still be right about Hitler.”
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To make up for the risqué joke, Jost then read from the cue card that he would be “sacrificing” his signature coif. “That’s right: I’m shaving it off,” he promised. “Send in the barber!”
When a barber materialized from off screen with clippers and a black cape, Jost continued: “Jerome, make me unpretty!”
It was Che that held him back, as Jerome got closer to Jost’s head.
“You was really gonna do it?” Che questioned. “Man, you are the greatest comedian of all time.”
“I was so scared,” Jost admitted.
The swap — which mostly falls along the lines of making Jost appear racist and Che appear like a sexual predator — was off to an auspicious start when Jost was forced to comment on Michael B. Jordan’s Oscar win, saying that difference between a Black vampire and white vampire is that the former “sucks dry … the welfare state.”
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Continuing on, Jost’s flailing ferry once again took center stage as he read out: “I have a beautiful ferry to give any Black person a one-way trip to the motherland.”
Meanwhile, Che was forced to comment on the controversies of the Michael biopic: “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong. He was right to molest all those kids,” he read out. “When I was 10 years old, Michael Jackson molested me and … gave me a fetish for middle-aged white women.” As an aside, Che clarified: “That is not why I have that.”
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