Even by the standards of shocking Michael Jackson jokes, it was a shocking joke. “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong,” Michael Che, a co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” said during last night’s episode. “He was right to molest all those kids.” This was delivered with palpable surprise at the words coming out of his mouth, but Che kept going: “They were lucky. I would have paid him to do it. And I did! That’s right, when I was 10 years old, Michael Jackson molested me, and the only thing it gave me was a fetish for middle-aged white women.” He then smiled and said, almost as an aside, “That is not why I have that.”
Che, of course, wasn’t saying what he actually thinks about the late pop star or his own personal sexual preferences. He was participating in a tradition where he and co-anchor Colin Jost each write “Weekend Update” material that the other man has to deliver cold, without seeing the joke ahead of time. The goal is to make their co-anchor look as crass, offensive, and stupid as possible, and Jost had crafted a real doozy for Che to read. But the joke wasn’t just about shocking the audience or innovating in the seemingly spent arena of Michael Jackson jokes—it also demonstrated how the right context can make grotesque humor sing, by turning the discomfort of the joke teller into the real gag.
In an interview with the comedian Mike Birbiglia, Che said that the stunt was inspired by the “Update” jokes they’d written that had bombed during dress rehearsal. (Che recalled how one groaner was greeted with a woman loudly saying “no.”) But for one episode, Che and Jost decided to recycle those same jokes for the other man to say. To Che’s surprise, the act of telling the audience that they were aware that these jokes were in bad taste “made them laugh hysterically.” Jost pushed for them to do it again, but without knowing the jokes ahead of time; Che admitted that he became worried that Jost was going to surprise him, “so I wrote new ones that were horrific.”
This has since evolved into a biannual tradition—and one of the best parts of the past decade of SNL. Highlights have included Jost getting Che to call Kendrick Lamar “the biggest bitch of them all” during the height of his feud with Drake, and Che writing a joke about Jost’s wife, Scarlett Johansson, that was so beyond the pale he later apologized to her on air.
The tradition has endured partly because of the sheer shock value of the jokes, which almost guarantees they go viral, but also because it’s very sweet, in a very strange way. After working together for a decade, the two men understand each other on an artistic and personal level. For Che, writing his jokes means leaning into Jost’s straight-laced vibe and the idea that he seems like a guy who would enjoy racist material, such as this line he was made to recite about the Oscar-winning film Sinners: “A Black vampire is just like a white vampire, except the only thing it sucks dry is the welfare state.” In contrast, Jost loves to make Che look like some sort of louche sexual deviant, as seen with the Jackson joke.
[Read: Time comes for Colin Jost—and for all of us]
It all comes down to the two men’s anguished delivery, which itself becomes the joke. In the interview with Birbiglia, Che noted that people worry they will “get in trouble” for laughing at jokes they know are wrong, so the secret is to give them permission. This is how jokes that on paper read as merely sexist and racist really become about two friends trying to make each other really, really uncomfortable.
The latest joke swap arrived just after Netflix’s recent roast of Kevin Hart, which was filled with nasty, not-all-that-winky exchanges between the featured comedians. Take one particularly vicious back-and-forth between Shane Gillis and Chelsea Handler, where Gillis cracked about Handler partying with Jeffrey Epstein and Handler returned fire by bringing up Gillis’s history of telling racist jokes. The environment wasn’t that fraternal. Maybe everyone was in on the joke, but the event certainly seemed like it was filled with people who despised one another, and who wanted to demonstrate that they were the edgiest and most callous person in the room.
In comparison, Jost and Che’s one-upmanship clearly comes from a place of deep affection. At one point, Jost was made to joke about a new album by Ye (formerly Kanye West): “Please try to separate the art from the artist, and remember that Ye can make awful music and still be right about Hitler.” At the end of “Weekend Update,” he said that to atone for this particular bit, “I’d like to sacrifice the most important thing in my life: my beautiful, award-winning, world-famous hair.” A barber entered the set from behind, pulled out his clippers, and draped Jost in a black cape.
But right before the clippers made contact, Che intervened with a passionate No! “You was really gonna do it?” he asked in seemingly genuine disbelief. “Man, you are the greatest comedian of all time,” he added, dropping the bit for a second and simply telling his friend how much he loved him.
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