Colin Jost, the anchor who turned a punchable face into a career

Colin Jost

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 29, 1982 Staten Island, New York
Occupation	Comedian and writer
Known for	Tom & Jerry, The Bad Guys 2, How to Be Single
Awards	2 Emmy

Most comedians spend their careers asking to be liked. Colin Jost built his on accepting that he would not be. At the Weekend Update desk of Saturday Night Live he plays the straight man in the blazer, the clean-cut Ivy Leaguer seated next to Michael Che, and the segment’s most-shared moments are the joke swaps in which Che writes material for him to read cold on live television, every line designed to make him look as bad as possible. The audience gasps, Jost winces, and the clip travels. He even named his memoir after the insult: A Very Punchable Face. What his career keeps testing is how far a man can go as the person audiences enjoy watching lose, and so far the answer is further than anyone who sat at that desk before him.

The polish is real, but it rests on Staten Island, the least glamorous of New York’s five boroughs and the one Jost has never stopped claiming. He grew up there as the son of Daniel Jost, a teacher at Staten Island Technical High School, and Dr. Kerry Kelly, the longtime chief medical officer of the New York City Fire Department. On the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Kelly was treating firefighters near the towers when the first one came down and buried her in debris. She survived, and the chapter Jost wrote about her is the one stretch of his memoir where the jokes stop.

Jost, who was born on June 29, 1982, commuted to Regis High School in Manhattan, where he edited the school paper, and went on to Harvard to study history and literature. There he became president of the Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine that has been sending writers into television comedy for decades, and graduated cum laude in 2004 with a senior thesis on Vladimir Nabokov. The first jobs were unglamorous: reporting and copy editing at the Staten Island Advance, then writing for the Nickelodeon animated series Kappa Mikey.

Saturday Night Live hired him as a staff writer in 2005, a year out of college. He became a writing supervisor in 2009 and co-head writer in 2012, a post he held until 2015 and again, alongside Che, from 2017 to 2022. In March 2014 he moved from the writers’ room to the camera, replacing Seth Meyers as a Weekend Update anchor, and Che joined him at the desk that autumn. On October 23, 2021, Jost passed Meyers as the longest-serving anchor in the segment’s history. The writing kept earning Emmy nominations, twenty of them by the Television Academy’s count, before the first wins arrived in 2025, both for SNL50: The Anniversary Special: Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special and Outstanding Variety Special (Live).

Film has been a side door rather than a second career. Jost wrote Staten Island Summer, a 2015 comedy about lifeguards at a swim club on his home island, and gave himself a small part as a police officer. Studio comedies followed in supporting roles: How to Be Single in 2016; Ben, the groom, in the live-action and animation hybrid Tom & Jerry and a brief turn in Coming 2 America, both in 2021; a senator in Fly Me to the Moon in 2024; and his first voice role, Mr. Moon, in the animated The Bad Guys 2 in 2025.

Away from the desk, the persona has been harder to sell. When Jost and Che hosted the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2018, reviewers found them low-energy and stranded whenever a joke died, and some questioned whether two Update anchors with a record of edgy material were the right faces for the first ceremony of the #MeToo era. His solo turn headlining the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2024 drew a similar verdict. The A.V. Club wrote that he had sleepwalked through it and other critics counted the long silences, although a closing tribute to his late grandfather, a firefighter, won the room back. The pattern says something the viral clips do not. Jost is a writer before he is a performer, and his comedy works best inside a structure, with a desk in front of him and a partner beside him. Take away the frame and the smirk that makes the swaps funny can read as detachment.

That may explain why the last two years look like a deliberate widening of the frame. Jost became the host of Pop Culture Jeopardy!, which premiered on Prime Video in December 2024 and brought him an Emmy nomination as a game show host. When the show moved to Netflix for its second season he came with it, presiding over a new three-person team format and a $300,000 grand prize from May 11 to June 5, 2026. At the Paris Olympics in 2024 he worked as an NBC correspondent at the surfing competition in Tahiti, a sport he practises himself, and came home early with infected reef cuts. On May 29, 2026, he appeared in The Breadwinner, the Nate Bargatze comedy directed by Eric Appel, as Conor, a stay-at-home father; reviews were mostly negative.

Jost has been with Scarlett Johansson since 2017. They married in October 2020 at their home in New York and had a son in August 2021. In 2023 he and Pete Davidson, his Saturday Night Live colleague and fellow Staten Islander, bought a decommissioned Staten Island ferry, the John F. Kennedy, which later served as a location for the horror film Screamboat.

The 52nd season of Saturday Night Live opened on September 26, 2026, with Jost and Che back at the desk for their thirteenth season together, and Jost has added a recurring impression of Pete Hegseth to the cold opens. The swaps will return sooner or later, with Che’s jokes about Harvard and money waiting on the prompter. Jost has turned being the target into the most durable job in the building, and the open question is how long he wants to keep it.

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Tags: actors, comedians, Saturday Night Live, Scarlett Johansson, Colin Jost, A Very Punchable Face

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