Colin Jost Tells Stand-Up Audience He’s ‘Probably’ Returning to ‘SNL’

The tea leaves seemed to indicate Colin Jost was out at Saturday Night Live. Consider all the omens: 

• Jost’s wife, Scarlett Johansson, hosted the final show of Season 50, a nice farewell gesture for the longtime Weekend Update anchor.
• Michael Che not only has dropped several hints that he’s out, but that Jost would be hitting the highway as well. “Don’t you think it’s time for us to give someone else a chance to host Weekend Update with me?” he “joked” in May.
• Lorne Michaels promised to “reinvent” SNL via a big shakeup last month — as the longest tenured Weekend Update hosts in the show’s history, Jost and Che are likely candidates to move on.
• Jost has taken on several new side gigs, including hosting game shows, Olympic coverage and a Ryder Cup pre-game show in late September, just days before SNL’s premiere.

But a Redditor who caught Jost’s stand-up act last night might have different news. According to the concert-goer, a fan asked Jost if he was returning to SNL. 

“I don’t know, probably,” Jost replied.

That’s, I don’t know, probably the most frustrating response Jost could have given, at least for those curious about his SNL future. “I don’t know, probably” could be read as an affirmation that he’s decided to return after all.

Then again, it could be an eye-rolling “Like I’m going to tell you!” answer to an audience he knows would report the news to the world. Another Redditor reported seeing Jost in May, when he gave a sarcastic answer to an audience member along the lines of “Yes, I decided tonight to reveal my fate in Alpharetta, Georgia.”

Another option: Jost truly doesn’t know. That seems unlikely, especially given Jost’s stature with the show, but Devon Walker complained earlier this week that Saturday Night Live keeps its cast members in the dark about their employment status until the last minute. Is there a twisted world in which Lorne Michaels still hasn’t made up his mind?

There’s no way Michaels would fire Jost, right? But as Dana Carvey revealed on the Fly on the Wall podcast this week, eight-year veteran and longest tenured female cast member Heidi Gardner was canned without warning. “From what I know as of this recording, it was not her idea to leave,” Carvey claimed (although the former SNL star has proven that his grasp of the facts can be unreliable).

Walker’s point remains: Why hasn’t this been decided and communicated by now? SNL will be staging live, 90-minute shows in less than a month, and it still hasn’t figured out its cast? After a flurry of hiring and firing news last week, has the show essentially locked in its Season 51 comics?

The answer can best be summed up in four words: “I don’t know, probably.”