The Hardest Part of Working With Colin Jost and Michael Che Is Finding Them
Despite all the rumors and innuendos, Colin Jost and Michael Che are back at Saturday Night Live for Season 51, extending their record as the show’s longest tenured fake-news anchors. For writer KC Shornima (once rumored to be a candidate to replace the guys), that’s not the worst news in the world. “They’re pretty chill,” she told Mike Birbiglia this week on his Working It Out podcast.
Sure, sure, but which one does Shornima like better? “Who’s more challenging to work with?” Birbiglia asked. “Che or Jost?”
“I think they both bring their own challenges,” she laughed before describing both comics as a qualified kind of chill, “like in terms of what SNL is.” Both are easy to deal with, she said. “The only things that I feel like are difficult sometimes is like, ‘Where are they?’”
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Shornima says her gig as an SNL writer — and specifically, as a writer for Weekend Update — is “such a chill job.” One reason is that she gets to submit her jokes anonymously. “You don’t write your name on your joke at Update,” she revealed. “It’s awesome.”
Instead, Che and Jost receive a list of jokes from which to choose. “When they see it, it’s just a compiled sheet,” she said. “So you never feel like your boss is mad at you, you know?” While rejected jokes must still sting, the list idea does sound less painful than pitching a so-so sketch to a room full of comics too exhausted to laugh.
What’s a workday like for a Weekend Update writer? Shornima shows up to work on Monday, and by midday Tuesday, she’s expected to submit 20 to 30 jokes for review. “Not all of them are winners,” she admits. “A lot of them, you’re trying to fill the page, you know?”
That process repeats every day until Friday, when a final batch of punchlines is submitted by 7 p.m. At that point, the Update writers can exhale. “There’s just this huge chill release of reading magazines and watching TV until we pick the jokes with Jost and Che,” she said. “And then Saturday, we cull the herd,” removing the weakest gags remaining in the pile.
Then the news cycle determines when the job is done. “You write right before the show, like if there’s Saturday news, you write on Saturday,” she said. “You keep working up until it’s airtime, basically. And then, it’s over.”
What about Che and Jost’s infamous joke swaps?
Shornima says it blew her mind when she first saw the holiday cringefest, amazed that they could get away with such vicious punchlines on network TV. But writing for the segment isn’t as easy as it looks. “When you’re writing for it, you’re like, what is the worst thought I could possibly have?” she explained. “I remember the first year I wrote really tame ones, because I was like, I’m not gonna let my head writer know I thought this! That’s crazy!”
But eventually, she leaned in. “You have to really think of the worst of the worst things you think,” she laughed. “And then you go from there.”
