A Very Punchable Face

by Colin Jost

Some of you think you know me, but you’re actually just thinking of the villain from an ’80s movie who tries to steal the hero’s girlfriend by challenging him to a ski race. And some of you, I’ll admit, were duped. Because half the copies of this book were titled Becoming 2: Michelle’s Got More to Say. And for that I apologize, even as I continue to fight Mrs. Obama aggressively in court.

Regardless, thank you for reading my book. I’m not a person who opens up easily. I’m half German and half Irish Catholic. So it’s never a good sign when your German side is the less repressed one.

And listen, I understand why some people want to punch me. I’m self-aware enough to realize what I look like. I look like a guy who’s always on the verge of asking, Do you know who my father is? Even though my father was a public school teacher on Staten Island. If you had Mr. Jost for mechanical drawing freshman year, then you know who my father is!*2

Here are some names I’ve been called on social media as well as regular media: “Bland,” “Pasty,” “Transparent,” “Milquetoast” (gross), “the Whitest Man in History,” “Powder,” “If Milk Became a Person,” “Milk-Face,” “Milk the Movie,” “You Tall Glass of Egg Whites” (™ Leslie Jones), “Casper,” “Gay Casper,” “Chicken Salad,” “If Jizz Became a Person,” and of course, “The Actual White Devil.” Sometimes these names are hurtful. Sometimes they’re just confusing. (What is a “Mayonnaise Yeti”?) But mostly they make me laugh. And I learned very early on that laughing at yourself is a terrific survival mechanism.

“Let thy speech be better than silence. Or be silent.” —DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS “If you just don’t interfere with yourself, you’re quite interesting.” —ROBIN WILLIAMS

An ex-girlfriend gave me some great advice: “You need to say what you’re thinking a lot more and not be afraid of being judged or being inarticulate or offensive or even boring.” 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. Sometimes this is good, because the story might be better by the time I relay it. But a lot of times it’s bad, because I could have just blurted it out and found the funny part of the story in real time. The more I get it outside my head and onto a stage or page (huge rhyme alert), the better off I am.

They were worried about their child not saying a single word. And that’s when they sent me to Staten Island University Hospital to work with a woman who saved my life.

I remember my speech therapist as this glowing blond angel who started pulling words out of my brain. Like when Ursula steals Ariel’s voice in The Little Mermaid, only she was putting the voice into me, while doctors removed my vestigial fish tail. And even though she was from Staten Island and probably had a thick Green Book accent, in my memory she sounds like the fairy godmother in Cinderella.*2 “Come on now, Colin! Enunciate! Let the magic of words transport you!” Instead of what she really said: “Repeat after me: My ex-husband is trash. If I catch him with another Perkins waitress, I’m getting Uncle Lou to break his thumbs.”

So if you’re reading this and you were a speech therapist at Staten Island University Hospital around 1986, please know: I am eternally grateful to you for giving me the power of speech. It was so much more effective than the Power of Grayskull. I don’t remember any of the exercises we did together. I just remember feeling that anger and frustration slowly fade away. I remember not being scared anymore. And I remember how happy I felt when I could finally express myself. I didn’t have to punch my way to justice anymore.

Touching

“Where you grew up becomes a big part of who you are for the rest of your life. You can’t run away from that. Well, sometimes the running away from it is what makes you who you are.” —HELEN MIRREN

The truth is, I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about my hometown. But it stems from a deep insecurity that I don’t really belong anywhere. One of my favorite moments on Weekend Update was when fellow Staten Islander Pete Davidson came on and talked about how I’m beloved in our hometown and he’s despised.*6 But even Pete would admit that’s not entirely true. Pete seems way more “authentically” Staten Island than I do, which is probably fair, even though it’s a little alienating for me. If I’m not “really” from my hometown, then where am I from?

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten.” —CORMAC MCCARTHY

When I was ten and my brother was seven, we would play a game called “Wolverine and the Wolf.” (For some reason all our games sounded like Aesop fables.) It wasn’t really a “game” so much as it was “a full physical fight.” We called it “Wolverine and the Wolf,” but a better name would have been “Child UFC.”* There were no rules except for one: The Wolverine (me) was “allowed to stand up.” Which meant the Wolf was not allowed to stand up, and thus had to crawl around on all fours. This meant that the older brother (me), who was already taller and hella fat, had the additional advantage of “standing.” So the Wolf would have to crawl around while I stood over him and took my time punching him in the back.

Once my brother had locked in “Wolf,” I would describe the benefits of being the Wolverine. “You can stand up on two legs instead of having to crawl. You can punch in addition to scratching. You can hold the Wolf down and punch it. And you can hold objects in your claws and use them to hit the Wolf.” I know. I was a legitimate monster. To quote my grandfather after I punched my brother in the back, “What a rotten kid.”

But my brother finally got a modicum of revenge when—against the established limitations on the Wolf—he reached up and raked his nails across my face, leaving a scar that’s still fairly prominent on my right cheek. The Wolf had finally slayed the fearsome Wolverine. And the Wolverine was taken to see a plastic surgeon to put his face back together. And then the Wolverine was taken to the doctor a second time after he saw the wound scabbing over, thought, Oooo, a scab!, and tore it off his cheek, reopening the wound.

Shortly after this, the Wolverine and the Wolf would see a ...

I was way too afraid to try drugs because, again, my brain was all I had! So I enjoyed the nerdier perks of Manhattan, like seeing a David Lynch movie that never would have played on Staten Island. Or sneaking in to watch the funeral of Robert Giroux, one of the partners of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You know, crazy teenage hijinks!

Me

The Staten Island Ferry is the busiest passenger ferry in the world, with almost 25 million riders a year. By my own unofficial calculations, it also holds the record for “Most Exposed Public Restrooms” (somehow designed so that any casual passersby can see the entire bathroom, all of the stalls, and every single drag queen fixing her makeup in the mirror), as well as the record for “Most Dead-Eyed Businessmen Staring at the Sea Contemplating Whether to End It.”

I prided myself on doing as many different categories as I could, probably because I was already scared of commitment, but also because I liked the variety of performing in different ways. Like how a lot of mimes are also serial killers.

Also, if you only compete in one category, then you have to hear the same speeches from your opponents hundreds of times. If I had to listen to some kid with a thick Long Island accent recite “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost for an entire school year, the road I would have taken would have been blowing my brains out.

That’s the strangest thing about Speech and Debate—how self-serious some of the kids are. There were white kids from private schools on the Upper West Side performing excerpts from John Leguizamo’s Ghetto Klown with no sense of irony. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a kid named Ezra Kleinman very earnestly deliver the line ...

I did “Original Oratory” a lot, where you write your own speech. And I essentially treated it like stand-up, where I would have a loose theme and then try to tell as many jokes as possible. There was always a moment when you walked into the classroom and saw the titles of the speeches your competitors were going to perform, and you immediately knew when it was gonna suck. You’d see titles like: Come and Get Me, Cancer! My Mom, the Ghos...

There were also genuinely amazing performers who made me realize how limited my own skills were. I remember seeing this one guy, who was a few years older, named Josh Gad. He won every national tournament my freshman year, and I said, “This kid’s going places!” like I was a 1920s silent movie director. Then I completely forgot about him until I went to see The Book of Mormon on Broadway and thought, Who is this talented fella! I looked at the Playbill and thought, Another Josh Gad?

The reality is that Harvard is very similar to a bunch of other schools, and if you got into Harvard, you weren’t special or spectacular. You just had good grades and something that helped you stand out in some way that Harvard happened to be looking for that year. (Or your last name was Wigglesworth and an admissions officer gave a speech like, “There has been a Wigglesworth at this university since 1636!” And everyone else in the meeting was like, “Okay! Okay! Let Wigglesworth in! As long as he doesn’t take a spot away from a hardworking celebrity’s fake-athletic daughter.”) The secret is: Anyone who went to any of the top 25 or 50 or even 100 colleges in America could easily graduate Harvard, maybe with better grades than actual Harvard graduates.

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. I got a perfect score on my math SAT*2, but when I got to Harvard I realized, Oh, damn. I suck at math.

People often ask me: “Did you, like, hang out with Mark Zuckerberg?” He was a year behind me and I remember when Facebook first started, because it only operated within our school (like an actual yearbook). I was probably one of the first hundred people to join, and I immediately thought: This is a gigantic waste of time. I wasn’t wrong…but I certainly never imagined it would become a multi-billion-dollar company. (My parents pointed this out to me several times while I was making four hundred dollars a week writing for a cartoon show.)

Then I got to college, and the religious kids were really religious. The kind who push religion on others in a way that really freaks me out. They’re like people who keep telling me, “You have to see Hamilton!” Honestly, no I don’t. And the more you keep telling me, the less likely I am to actually see it.*4

Super religious people are basically saying, “You have to see Jesus! Otherwise you’ll never get to heaven!” And I keep thinking, Yeah…but I don’t want to go to heaven if you’re gonna be there…

I have subsequently seen it and it’s excellent.

“Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city…who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler…” —THOMAS PYNCHON, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

The Harvard Lampoon is partly a humor magazine (published somewhere between zero and ten times a year); partly a secret society (but with rituals that are closer to an escape room than a fraternity); partly a funhouse filled with hidden rooms, moving panels, and very random objects (like the Skeksis’ throne from The Dark Crystal); and partly a countercultural menace to Harvard and the city of Boston.*1

She told Congress, “In the department’s first one hundred years, we filled a wall with the names of fallen firefighters. On the eleventh of September, we filled a new wall.” She would never say that she was a hero, because she’s very humble and because she knows how much firefighters risk every day doing their jobs. But she’s been a real, lasting hero for a long time. She protected and improved the lives of thousands of firefighters. And when you talk to them about my mom, you can tell they love her, because they know how much she cares about them. She retired from the fire department in March 2018. She did forty and out, to the day.

My mom drove up to visit me at college in late October 2001. It was the first day she had taken off since September 11th. I didn’t know she was coming, and I was so happy and surprised to see her. I said, “What are you doing here?” And she said, “I needed a hug.”

Crying. Jesus.

My love for Russia started in high school when I took a senior elective called “Great European Novels” and three of them were Russian—Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Anna Karenina was rough because I violently procrastinated (as is my style in all aspects of life) and had to read the entire 864-page book in three days. There have been studies that show that “cramming” can work in the short run but doesn’t help you retain information in the long run. This might explain why I cannot tell you a single plot point from Anna Karenina or name a single character outside of Anna Karenina. (If she is not actually in the book, that wouldn’t surprise me either.) The other two books were among my favorites of all time and made me want to learn a lot more about Russian literature. So when I arrived at college, I abandoned my stated major—Economics—and instead chose Russian Books (a.k.a. The Opposite of Economics). For context, jobs available in the field of economics include: all jobs.

Why is the title of every college paper disgusting? There’s always a pun, then a colon, then a string of nonsense phrases like “literary hyperconsciousness” and “Freudian Postcolonialism.” Read more about it in my essay “Over the Overkill: Deconstructing the Constructing of Phraseological Masturbation in College Term Papers.”

For any Russia-heads reading this, it was a short story called “Lower World Tambourine” by one of my favorite contemporary Russian authors, Viktor Pelevin. I highly recommend his book Omon Ra (available in English), about a fake expedition to the moon by astronauts who don’t know it’s fake. It’s very “Russian funny.”

“Make breakfast” is a glorified way of saying: I poured some kind of animal’s milk over a bowl of off-brand Russian Lucky Charms, where the cartoon leprechaun was threatening children with a switchblade.

Mrs. Purij had to cut us off when we launched into Sandler’s audio game show: “Is This Man Having Sex or Just Working Out?” (Spoiler: Every one of the men is having loud, graphic sex.)

(Kanye would also walk off the stage, but that was just at dress rehearsal when he got into a screaming match with our ninety-five-year-old lighting designer.*1)

It turned out that I had serious heart palpitations that were brought on by a combination of stress and staying awake forty hours straight every week, subsisting only on pizza and bulk candy. My doctor’s advice was: “Don’t stay up forty hours straight every week, eating only pizza and bulk candy. Because if you do, your heart will try to walk out of your chest. “Oh, and try to relax.”

I say, “I’ll put on my brand-new light blue golf shorts and I’ll be right over!” This was my (verbatim, unedited) text exchange with my friend John Solomon after I completed that golf round: ME: Just shit my pants on a golf course so we good JOHN: Please tell me that’s real ME: So real JOHN: Fuck yes Might be my fav thing about u ME: The details are pretty great And upsetting JOHN: Give me one ME: This sounds like it would defy physics but I shit the front of my pants

So I’m on my coworker’s lawn with a full diaper, staring down a garden gnome that’s covered in the ravioli I ate for lunch, when I hatch an ingenious plan: I’ll go home to my parents’ place for, like, forty-five minutes, shower and change my clothes, maybe sneak in a quick nap, then be back at the party before Jessica even notices. My plan wound up working perfectly. EXCEPT that instead of showering and changing my clothes and going back to the party, I took my soiled pants off, put them in my parents’ washing machine, FORGOT TO PRESS START, then fell asleep on their couch for eight hours.

Immediately my brother, Casey, was thrilled. This was his greatest dream come true. He always got in trouble at school, and I always escaped trouble at school (mainly because my grades were good, unlike my brother, who has literally read one book in his entire life and I’m not sure he actually finished it. If you’re curious, it’s a book of Greek myths).

Instead I spent the summer touring and doing stand-up, and I decided that whatever happened with Update, I wanted to get better as a performer. I didn’t know how, exactly, outside of getting onstage every night, so I started meeting with an acting coach. This was something I hesitated about doing for a long time because I was embarrassed. Isn’t that dumb? I was embarrassed about getting help. And I was embarrassed about trying. I was scared to put myself out there and commit to getting better, because if I committed and failed then I would have no one to blame but myself. (This probably described my approach to all my relationships up to that point, too.)

Well, I should clarify that, because I was already trying really hard, but at several different things simultaneously. I was a head writer at SNL, I was a headlining stand-up comedian who toured around the country, and I was filming a movie for Paramount. I decided to narrow it down to the one thing I cared about most: Weekend Update. I stepped down as head writer. I stopped going on the road to do stand-up during off weeks. And I let the director and the studio edit the movie I wrote. I wanted to succeed at one thing instead of failing at four.

Che got me to think about Update in a different way. He taught me that if you try to do something you love and something someone else wants you to do, they both suffer, and the thing you love might disappear entirely. (It might disappear anyway if the audience hates it, but at least you gave it your best shot.)

I’ve learned to eliminate any joke I wouldn’t be excited to say on the air, even if it seems like a “safe” joke that “will work.” (I now hate the phrase “That will work.” It’s such a mediocre goal to set for yourself.)

And for dinner, they feature a “Key West Chicken Quesadilla” (all the chickens are read a Hemingway short story right before they’re killed), as well as “Jimmy’s Jammin’ Jambalaya,” which—sorry, copycats!—is a registered trademark.

“Who was your least favorite host?” Why do random strangers think I will answer this question? “Oh, thank god you asked! I’ve been waiting to open up to someone about this. Helen Mirren pantsed me in front of the entire crew.” The actual truth is that I don’t have a least favorite host. I have three least favorite hosts, because they were all so bad that I can’t pick just one.

Also, sometimes a host is just challenging to write for and you have no idea how to use them effectively. Like when Lance Armstrong hosted (before he was a villain), I pitched him an idea where he would do a public service announcement that his yellow Livestrong bracelets actually cause wrist cancer. He said, and I quote, “No fucking way, dude.” And then I had zero more ideas!