Saturday Night Live delved into an announcer’s worst nightmare
As Colin Jost and Michael Che wrapped up the 50th season of SNL, the two followed through on an annual Weekend Update tradition that sees them write jokes for the other to read to cap off the year. The premise is that they make each other read jokes live on air that the other person has never seen before.
As you might imagine, the jokes can often toe the line of what is deemed culturally acceptable. They’re objectively funny, but deliberately push the envelope on sensitive topics. But they’re jokes, and that’s the point.
Jost and Che have built a reputation on this exact brand of irreverence, and it’s a big reason why SNL continues to thrive as it wraps up five decades on the air.
And before they put a bow on Season 50, Che had Jost say something that most sports announcers would do a double-take on. No, it wasn’t Athletics’ first baseman, Nick Kurtz, but while staying in the Bay Area, Che had Jost deliver a joke about the son of Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr.
For what it’s worth, Jost has more sports media experience than you might think. During the 2024 Olympics in Paris, NBC sent the Weekend Update anchor to Tahiti to cover surfing. It didn’t go particularly well. His coverage was smooth, but his time on the island wasn’t. He scraped his toes on a coral reef, developed a staph infection, and even got an ear infection for good measure.
Still, that might have been less painful than what Che put him through Saturday night.
“Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr is here with his family,” Jost said. “I got to meet his son, Nick. And I love Steve; I like Nick. But I wouldn’t say I’m a Nick Kerr lover.”
“That seems beside the point, Colin,” Che deadpanned.
The pause after “Nick” was surgical. The live audience gasped, laughed, and winced all at once. Jost immediately broke, unable to keep it together, with his wife, Scarlett Johansson, sitting just five feet away. Even she couldn’t hold a straight face.
They did the joke. They did the thing.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.