Months after Scarlett Johansson was the subject of a sullied joke on Saturday Night Live’s Christmas episode, the star is still being asked about her
Months after Scarlett Johansson was the subject of a sullied joke on Saturday Night Live’s Christmas episode, the star is still being asked about her viral reaction to the punch line.
“It was so vulgar,” she tells InStyle in a recent cover story. “I just can’t believe that they went there. I was like—it was so gross. It was really gross. And, like, old-school gross.”
For those in need of an icky reminder: Every year, Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost, does a Christmas joke swap with his Weekend Update cohost Michael Che in which each host forces the other to read provocative jokes on air that they haven’t read before. In December, Jost said the following during SNL’s final broadcast of the year: “Costco has removed the roast beef sandwich from its menu. But I ain’t trippin’. I’ve been eating roast beef every night since my wife had the kid.”
An SNL camera then panned to Johansson, who welcomed a child with Jost in 2021. Her jaw was completely dropped. It seems she didn’t know that she would be filmed after Jost read the joke: “The fact that it took on a full To Catch a Predator–style reveal or whatever, that was so intense,” she told InStyle with a laugh. “All of a sudden, it was like a whole bunch of people holding up lights, and a guy with a video camera. They were waiting for me to react. I felt insane. I was like, I think I’m going to faint.”
But Johansson maintains that the joke itself was above board. “My experience of it was so funny,” she told the magazine. The actor also said that she had been alerted to Che’s “vagina joke” by producers ahead of time. “I was like, I mean, it’s a vagina joke, how bad could it be?” Johansson recalled. “And then as soon as the Costco photo came up, I was like, ‘No! No, Michael!’”
Jost appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon the month after Christmas Joke Swap and said his wife “was genuinely so shocked” about the segment. “I’m in trouble, I think, with a lot of people.” In her recap of the episode, Vanity Fair’s own Karen Valby wrote that if Johansson “was smart, she went home with [Kristen] Wiig post-after-party instead of Jost.” But Johansson told InStyle that she and Jost crawled into bed together post-episode, still laughing about the segment. “I was like, ‘My nerves are shot.’ And Colin said, ‘Me too,’” she remembered.
Since Johansson and Jost began dating in 2017, the Oscar nominee has often been a topic of jokes on Weekend Update. During last year’s holiday joke swap, Jost was goaded into saying, “New York state now allows movie theaters to serve alcohol, which is how I’m finally able to enjoy my wife’s little art movies.” When Johansson hosted SNL for the sixth time back in 2019, she shared her affection for Studio 8H, concluding her monologue by saying, “This place means so much to me. I have so many friends here and I met the love of my life here,” before kissing Jost onstage.
But Saturday Night Live has offered the Jurassic World Rebirth star some retribution in recent months. On last week’s episode, fellow cast member Mikey Day poked fun at Jost for making far less money than Johansson: “Imagine, Colin, if I were sitting here on television behind this desk, staring at that camera, the world staring back at me knowing that my wife’s income dwarfs my own! I would die.”
COMMENTS