Michael Che is glad that Saturday Night Live didn’t let him do the more brutal version of his April Fool’s Day joke on Colin Jost.
“That was a tough one for him to recover from,” Che told Mike Birbiglia on his Working It Out podcast about his 2023 April Fool’s Day joke on his Weekend Update co-host. Che said the one prank he pulled on Jost that he thought may have gone “too far” was when he “told the audience not to laugh at anything Colin said.”
“They were really scared about the April Fools one,” Che explained. “I told the audience in holding like, ‘Hey, when Colin comes out, don’t laugh at anything he says. And I wanted to do it for a whole segment, and they were like, you can’t do that to him.’” Che said he wasn’t happy that the SNL team wouldn’t go for it, until he saw Jost’s reaction live.
“I was like, ‘It’s funny…the longer it goes!’ And it was like, ‘You can’t do it. So we had negotiated it down to like two or three jokes, I think,” he said. “Which, you know, I was kind of mad about… but it ended up being OK.”
Jost called it “the meanest thing you’ve ever done” at the time, when the pair’s joke turn-taking only drew him crickets while Che got big laughs.
“I tell my first joke, and it gets a huge laugh,” Che recalled. “And then he goes again. No one laughs again… And then he writes down in the book, as I’m telling the joke, I could see him writing, ‘This is the worst Update I’ve ever done.’ He’s like, spinning. And then finally, we let him in on it. ‘Cause I had someone yell, ‘You stink!’ from the audience.”
On his last joke that drew only a tepid reaction from the crowd, the audience member’s pre-planned interjection seemed to be his last straw. Jost put his face in his hands as he realized his part of the show wasn’t going well.
That’s when Che revealed, “I told them not to laugh at you for April Fool’s,” which got an even bigger reaction from Jost. “Am I not mic’d?” Jost says he was thinking throughout the segment, “And then I was like ‘Oh, I just suck!” As Che tries to move on to his next joke, Jost interjects, “You’re evil!”
Che concluded Monday, “I remember thinking afterward, I’m glad we only did it for two or three jokes.”
