Colin Jost and Michael Che’s annual “joke swap” segment on Saturday Night Live may be a tradition, but it’s one Jost’s wife Scarlett Johansson wanted no part of.
Johansson, 39, said she “blacked out” upon seeing her photo during the “Weekend Update” segment where Jost, 42, and Che, 41, write outrageous jokes for each other to deliver live.
“Oh, God,” Jost reacted when he saw his wife’s name appear on the teleprompter.
“ChatGPT has released a new voice assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in ‘Her,’” Jost continued with a nervous laugh. “Which I’ve never bothered to watch, because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”
The Fly Me to the Moon star, who is usually the target of at least one joke each year during the segment, revealed her reaction to the joke about her body on The Kelly Clarkson Show.
“I black out for that period of the night,” she told host Kelly Clarkson on Thursday, July 11. “I actually don’t remember it. As soon as the picture came up I just – I fully blacked out.”
Johansson confirmed that the segment is, in fact, real and the ‘Weekend Update” hosts have no idea what joke the other has written for them ahead of time. She thought this particular joke was on the milder side.
“That’s like a tame version if you guys have ever seen the jokes,” Johansson said. “We need to, like, go into witness protection that night. Like, I am absolutely terrified we’re gonna be targeted. It’s so bad. It is brutal. I feel like every year it gets worse.”
“And they do it at Christmas too. It’s like a little gift to each other,” the actress added with a laugh.
This isn’t the first time Johansson spoke out about the nerves that come with watching the NBC variety show.
“I now rarely watch [SNL] without having a sense of … not overwhelming panic, just like a slight underwhelming panic because I just feel like at any moment something’s going to fall apart,” she said during a July 2021 episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show. “And that’s the excitement of SNL and for all audiences, right? Because it’s absolutely live.”
Johansson and Jost began dating in May 2017. The couple tied the knot in October 2020 and celebrated the arrival of their first child together, son Cosmo, in August 2021. Johansson shares daughter, Rose Dorothy, 9, with ex-husband Romain Dauriac.
