Scarlett Johansson ‘blacked out’ during Colin Jost’s ‘painful’ ‘SNL’ joke swap

Colin Jost isn’t the only one cringing through his annual Saturday Night Live joke swap with Michael Che.

Scarlett Johansson, who’s been married to Jost since 2020, says she too suffers through the recurring sketch. During her Thursday visit to The Kelly Clarkson Show, the Fly Me to the Moon actress admitted that she essentially “blacked out” during the latest rendition of the segment.

“We need to go into like, witness protection after that night,” Johansson joked. “Like, I am absolutely terrified we’re gonna be like, targeted. It’s so bad. I black out for that period of the night. I don’t — I actually don’t remember it.”

The dangerous Weekend Update segment is simple: Che and Jost take turns reading jokes, which they have not seen in advance, written for them by the other man. The tradition is typically an excuse for Che to trick Jost into cold reading hilariously offensive jokes, some of which make mention of his famous wife.

Most recently, Che made Jost quip about OpenAI’s voice feature assistant stealing Johansson’s voice.

“ChatGPT has released a new voice assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in Her,” Jost began uneasily in the May episode. “Which I’ve never bothered to watch, because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”

After host Kelly Clarkson played the clip for Johansson, the Black Widow star pointed out that Jost is usually forced to read much worse. “That’s like a tame version,” she said.

Clarkson agreed: “It’s Daytime [television], we kept it tame.”

Johansson later described the segment as “brutal,” adding, “I feel like every year it gets worse, it’s just terrible.”

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Of the Her joke, she said, “It’s painful. I mean I really do — I actually don’t remember that segment. I fully blacked out.” 

Despite the terrified expression that Jost wears whenever the Weekend Update segment comes back around, he spoke fondly of the tradition during an April episode of Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi, calling his time in the hot seat “both terrifying and exhilarating.”

“It’s kind of crazy. There’s just not a lot of live television in the world anymore,” he said. “So the idea that you’re on live television and you have to say something and you don’t know what it is, that’s pretty crazy — and it’s not usually gentle. I’m someone who can also be really in my head a lot of times, and it definitely gets you out of your head. I really like that.”

If nothing else, he added, “it’s definitely a reminder to not be afraid of trying things.”

You can watch Johansson react to the terrifying joke swap tradition above.