Michael Che watches The Sopranos all the way through about four to five times a year. “It’s my comfort zone show,” he tells me on the 9th floor of 30
Michael Che watches The Sopranos all the way through about four to five times a year. “It’s my comfort zone show,” he tells me on the 9th floor of 30 Rock last Tuesday. When I arrive, the Saturday Night Live vet is in the middle of an episode where AJ Soprano’s depressed because his fiancée has dumped him. “Dominican girl,” he says, shaking his head. He puts the series on mute as I take a seat on a couch in his dressing room, which formerly belonged to Pete Davidson, Bobby Moynihan, and maybe Fred Armisen. (He can’t remember.)
He also can’t name his favorite Sopranos episode (“it’s tough”), but Che can confidently say that the show plays a necessary part in his joke-writing process. “A lot of it is just some 40-year-old man mumbling to himself in the living room while The Sopranos is on mute.” Che must have seen a lot of James Gandolfini in a bathrobe this summer because he spent it working overtime on a project of his very own.
“SNL is like a teacher’s schedule. You get the summers,” Che says, matter-of-factly. While he’s grateful for the time off, Che admits that the infamously grueling SNL schedule makes it difficult to find the time and energy to work on his own material. “I feel like comedy is a conversation,” Che says. “It’s hard to pick it up after six to seven months [away]. It’s hard to tour. It’s hard to build because you don’t get a ton of time off,” he says. “When you do get time off, you’re so tired, mentally exhausted. The last thing you want to do is more comedy.”
At the end of every season, it seems, rumors swirl that Che is gonna be out the door. Some of those rumors had truth to them. “I thought I was leaving three or four different times, honestly,” he says. Che shows me a white Yankees bomber jacket, riddled with Sharpied signatures from SNL’s 50th anniversary event last year. “I got everybody to sign my jacket…Tina and Eddie and all those guys. I got the legends. Garrett Morris,” he says, name-checking SNL’s first Black cast member. Ultimately, he’s decided to stay in the toasty embrace of Studio 8H. “It’s a hard thing to give up, man. It’s a hard thing to leave,” he says.
And so, before heading into his 12th year as Weekend Update co-anchor with Colin Jost, Che spent his summer polishing his comedy. The result is Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, his third stand-up special (and directorial debut), which just debuted on Netflix.
