Michael Che, the SNL anchor who announced his exit and then stayed for a record run

Michael Che

Photo: Arturo Pardavila III on Flickr; cropped and contrast adjusted by 0xF8E8 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 19, 1983 Manhattan, New York City, United States
Occupation	Stand-up comedian, television writer and Weekend Update co-anchor
Known for	Chinese Puzzle, Top Five, Michael Che Matters
Awards	2 Writers Guild of America

Michael Che’s new hour of stand-up opens its campaign with a joke about the man who sits next to him on Saturday nights. In the first clip from Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, he needles Colin Jost about his marriage to Scarlett Johansson and complains that Jost “acts like it’s not a miracle.” The line lands because the audience already knows the seating chart. Che has spent more of his working life at the Saturday Night Live news desk than anywhere else, and a good part of that time telling people the desk is not where he really lives.

That contradiction shapes how he is read. On television he is the anchor who seems privately amused by his own material, half a beat from breaking. In comedy clubs, where he keeps returning between NBC tapings, he works closer to the edge and sometimes goes over it. Most of what is interesting about Che, and most of the trouble he has found, sits in the gap between those two rooms.

His full name is Michael Che Campbell. He arrived in May 1983, the youngest of seven children of Rose and Nathaniel Campbell, and grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with a middle name his father chose in honour of Che Guevara. One of his brothers became an NYPD detective and another retired from law enforcement, which is worth remembering every time he jokes about the police, and he jokes about the police a lot.

He graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, then drifted. He worked customer service at a Toyota dealership for two of them. He painted acrylic portraits of celebrities, printed them on T-shirts and sold them in SoHo, where Tommy Hilfiger noticed the shirts and offered him freelance design work. He never turned in a design.

Stand-up came late, in 2009, when he was already in his mid-twenties, and then it moved quickly. By 2012 he had a set on Late Show with David Letterman. The following year Variety named him one of its ten comics to watch, Rolling Stone counted him among the 50 funniest people working, and Saturday Night Live took him on, first as a guest writer and then on staff. In June 2014 he surfaced as a correspondent on The Daily Show, appearing in nine segments; the best remembered, “Race/Off: Live From Somewhere,” was a satire built around the Ferguson protests that ended with Che floating in outer space.

By the autumn he was back at NBC in the chair that defined him. On 27 September 2014 he replaced Cecily Strong at the Weekend Update desk beside Jost, the first Black co-anchor in the segment’s history. He joined the main cast in his third season, and in December 2017 he and Jost were named co-head writers of the show. The writing staff won two Writers Guild of America Awards for sketch series in that period; Che’s own Emmy record is a string of writing nominations without a win. His film work has stayed modest, the best-known part being Paul, one of the friends around Chris Rock‘s character in Rock’s Top Five.

The partnership with Jost turned out to be the durable thing. Their twice-yearly joke swap, in which each anchor reads live, sight unseen, jokes the other wrote to make him squirm, converted the dullest format on the show, two men reading cue cards, into an event. It did not travel well to bigger stages. When the pair hosted the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2018, a share of the reviews described the evening as flat and low-energy and the rapport that works at a desk looked thin in a theatre.

The riskier Che is the one who appears online. In July 2021, as Simone Biles withdrew from events at the Tokyo Olympics, his Instagram Stories filled with jokes about her sent in by followers, one of them about Larry Nassar, the team doctor whose abuse Biles survived. Che’s account rated it “Absolutely tasteless. 9/10.” A note then claimed he had been hacked; users pointed out it was set in the same font as the posts it disowned. He deleted the note, wiped the account and soon returned to promote a live show. NBC, which broadcasts both Saturday Night Live and the Olympics, did not comment. The episode exposed the limit of the defence he leans on most: a club grants a comic licence to test a bad joke in front of a room that chose to be there, and that licence does not follow the joke onto a phone screen.

His most personal television project put the same friction on screen deliberately. That Damn Michael Che, the HBO Max sketch series he created and wrote, opened with an episode called “Policin’,” in which he is stuck in an elevator with a white woman determined to talk about the police. HBO had turned down his first choice of title, That Black-Ass Michael Che. The series ran two six-episode seasons, the second released in May 2022, and reviewers found it uneven but pointed; Common Sense Media called it laugh-through-tears satire. No third season followed.

The same spring, he told a stand-up audience in March 2022 that he would leave the Update desk at the end of the season. By May, on CBS News Sunday Morning, he sounded less certain. He and Jost gave up the head-writer jobs before the next season, and both kept their chairs. His second Netflix hour, Michael Che: Shame the Devil, had arrived the previous November to a cooler reception than Michael Che Matters, his 2016 Netflix debut; Decider’s reviewer advised viewers to go back to the earlier special.

In 2024 the anchors took the act off NBC with Colin Jost & Michael Che Present: New York After Dark, a Peacock special filmed at the Bell House in Brooklyn. When season 52 of Saturday Night Live opened on 26 September 2026, they were at the desk for a 13th season together, the longest run of any Weekend Update pairing. Two days later Netflix announced the new hour.

Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota was taped across four shows over two nights in late August at First Avenue, the Minneapolis music venue, and Che directed it himself, producing alongside Matthew Vaughan. It premieres worldwide on Netflix on 13 October 2026. The Jost joke in the trailer shows he knows where most viewers will recognise him from; the hour itself has to prove that the club comic can hold a stage for sixty minutes with no desk beside him and no partner to read his worst jokes.

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