Saturday Night Live comic Colin Jost has admitted he got himself in a spot of trouble with a rather graphic joke at his wife Scarlett Johansson’s expense last month.
For SNL’s annual Christmas episode, Colin and his Weekend Update co-host Michael Che prepared near-the-knuckle jokes for one another to read out live on air, which they were not allowed to see ahead of time.
During Colin’s section, he was given jokes about his Oscar nominee wife to read out – all while she watched on stunned from backstage.
“I want to dedicate this next joke to my boo Scarlett Johnasson,” he read from the prompter, while a “genuinely worried” Scarlett was seen watching on the monitor.
“Hey, boo,” Colin continued. “Y’all know Scarlett just celebrated her 40th birthday, which means I’m about to get up out of there.”
Later in the segment, Colin sparked a stunned reaction from Scarlett when he continued with another joke written by his co-host, which we’ll spare you the details of, but it involved comparing a certain part of his wife’s anatomy to a particular meat dish.
During an interview on Monday’s edition of The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon asked Colin if the quip had landed him “in trouble with Scarlett”, to which he responded: “I’m in trouble, I think, with a lot of people.”
“Scarlett was genuinely so shocked,” he revealed. “I was obviously surprised by everything, but they gave her a heads-up, they were like, ‘hey, would you be OK if Michael made a little kind of vagina joke at some point?’. And she’s like, ‘sure, whatever, I’m open to it’.
“And then [for me] it was the opposite, I didn’t know where it was going, and then the graphic came up…”
Colin and Scarlett have been married for almost five years, and have a son, who was born in August 2021.
She also has a 10-year-old daughter from her previous relationship with ex-fiancé Romain Dauriac.