Seth Meyers, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Show They Still Have It on Weekend Update
In the days leading up to Amy Poehler hosting Saturday Night Live’s second episode of Season 51, there was a lot of speculation that Seth Meyers would make his return to the Weekend Update desk with his former co-anchor.
We also knew from the jump that Tina Fey would be in the episode, as she played a lip-fillered, dog-murdering Kristi Noem in the cold open. So it really shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise when the iconic trio popped up on Weekend Update. After Colin Jost delivered a pretty underwhelming joke about a woman pushing out a 13-pound baby, Poehler barreled into Jost’s side insisting he could do better.
Within seconds, she was joined by Fey and Meyers.
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“My first wife and my second wife, everybody,” Poehler said to screams from the audience.
Then, to the deep delight of the 14-year-old me who used to stay up reblogging Weekend Update GIFs on Tumblr, Jost and Michael Che entered into a rapid-fire joke-off against Fey, Poehler and Meyers. Punchlines included gems like the baby being pregnant already, cavernous vaginas and chopping off penises.
It is truly where SNL excels: a bunch of toe-the-line jokes that have you thinking, Wait — was that sexist, or was it feminist? And then kind of shrugging because at least it was funny. The return of the older, nerdier, less sexual Challengers was also a heavy dose of nostalgia. It was joyful to remember a time when Weekend Update wasn’t spending 50 percent of its runtime slogging through the insane bullshit Trump is inflicting on the country. There used to be the privilege of spending 90 seconds on fat baby jokes!
While Poehler, Fey and Meyers all have moved on to bigger things, and there’s definitely not room for five anchors on Update, this brief moment of an Avengers-style assembly of the last two decades’ anchors was as refreshing as it was funny.
