A Very Punchable Face

by Colin Jost

Because, again, books were my friends. Math was my girlfriend. And I lost my virginity to spelling.

Being boring is what I fear most, so I tend to keep a story or a joke in my head until it’s ready to tell other people.

I now sound like an Ohio weatherman—neutral, friendly, and almost fully recovered after escaping that cult.

My mom always said that she loved Staten Island because it still felt like a small town. You would go to the supermarket and see a friend. You would go to church and see your enemies. And thanks to the Mafia, you would go to the park and see the dead body of your friend’s dad. You know, small-town stuff.

Harvard is like Professor X’s School for Mutants, except their mutant powers are playing cello or computer programming or being a Saudi prince. It’s a quarter athletes and legacies, a quarter geniuses, and then the remaining half are fairly smart kids who suddenly realize they aren’t geniuses.

It was hard to write cold opens in the Obama era because he wasn’t on television every day attacking American companies or re-tweeting white supremacists.

That’s two lessons I learned very quickly: (1) You don’t need to do anything in life—if it feels wrong or unnatural, it probably is. And (2) I had no one but myself to blame for not trusting my own instincts and pushing back when I felt something was wrong.

If you’re a regular cast member on SNL, people might hate a character you do or might criticize your impression of, say, JonBenét Ramsey. But when you’re on Update, people hate you. There’s no hiding behind a different persona or an accent. Plus, if you’re a regular cast member and you’re new on the show, you might only appear briefly on your first couple episodes as a waiter or, say, JonBenét Ramsey, just to get your feet wet.

I like to quote the Olive Garden: “When you’re here, you’re breadsticks.”

Not infrequently, there is a sketch or a joke that was similar to something posted on YouTube/Twitter/Grindr/whitehouse.gov.

For those not familiar, MRSA is a staph infection that’s resistant to most antibiotics, because humans have used antibiotics so often that some parasites have adapted and built up a resistance. Like how we as a society have seen so much of Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney Kardashian that by the time Kendall and Kylie came along, we were like, “Sure, this is normal.”

“Well, if you want, you could also try to suffocate the larvae for a few days and then remove them with tweezers.” If I want? All I could think of was a thousand tiny baby botflies crying, “Help me, Colin! I can’t breathe!” and I would lean down and whisper, “It’s okay. It’ll all be over soon.” Then I’d put on Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” and clear out a matchbox to use as a mass grave.