Sketch Artist Do on SNL,’ and I’Ll Try It at Dress Rehearsal and It Will Just Not Work at All
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MONTAGE people to come to my music without any troit Symphony Orchestra, influenced by Today, Holland tries to convey the same preconceived ideas about what the music Motown, R&B, soul, and other popular mu- message to his composition students: “If I’m was going to be.” At some point, he stopped sic genres he’d always listened to. It was, he not telling you who I am in a genuine way, I’m worrying about how to manage audience thinks, the first time he consciously decided not sure why you’d want to listen to what I perceptions. Soon after this realization, he to let that side of him come out clearly in his have to say,” he reasons. Without that, he says, completed a 2003 commission for the De- music. He wrote what felt true. “Who cares what I’m writing?” stage, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, this will be great to Sketch Artist do on SNL,’ and I’ll try it at dress rehearsal and it will just not work at all. There’s this Colin Jost writes jokes for page, stage, and camera. special rhythm to being either at a club or by oset babür theater.” When developing a sketch for SNL, Jost often starts by thinking of a voice, and then writer’s style isn’t always New Yorker’s humor section, Shouts and Mur- deciding which actor could most naturally neatly captured in a single piece murs—“Oh, droit moral? It means ‘droid mor- embody it. He created the character Drunk of work, but with Colin Jost ’04, als.’ Like it’s such an obvious moral question Uncle, for example—meant to “sound like A his “Mocktails,” a collection of that even a robot would know the answer.” an uncle pretty much everyone has”—by cartoons scribbled on cocktail napkins, Jost has been writing comedy since his working with cast member Bobby Moyni- are especially telling. A JetBlue plane feels first year with the Harvard Lampoon, and han. Drunk Uncle makes comments rang- blue, lamenting that it misses its friends; a performing stand-up comedy for more than ing from cringe-worthy to downright rac- piece of jerk chicken rattles off some un- a decade. But transitioning between writ- ist, almost always circling back to how couth remarks. This brand of droll wordplay ing comedy and performing comedy isn’t America just isn’t the country it used to be, is Jost’s bread and butter. It comes through simple—and what’s more, he says, writing While dreaming him up, Jost and Moyni- in his stand-up performances (“I went to for stage, screen, and print all require differ- han thought about the character’s family, his Party City the other day, and it was totally ent techniques. “With stand-up, the rhythm pleasures, and his grievances, and slowly, his dead,” he joked during a show in Boston this really differs,” he explains. “I’ll try a sketch personality began to develop: sloppy, brash, fall) as well as in his contributions to The during a stand-up show, and it’ll work on old-fashioned. This technique is key to cre- ating strong SNL characters, but Jost has found that it ac- tually hampers his ability to write the kind of humor that appears only on the page. Ear- ly in his career, he had been keen to contribute Shouts and Murmurs because the columns struck him as similar to what he’d done for the Lampoon. But after years of working on the show, he found it difficult to switch back to magazines. “If I had someone’s voice in mind for a character that I was writing, other people didn’t necessarily hear the same voice,” he says. These days, Jost is best known for co-anchoring SNL’s Weekend Update, a segment that parodies a traditional news desk. It’s a big seat to fill: previ- ous hosts have included Chevy Colin Jost (left) with his co-host, Michael Che, at the Weekend Update desk for Saturday Night Live 54 January - February 2018 Photograph by Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE Chase, Seth Meyers, and Amy Poehler. But ald Trump’s leaked Access Hollywood tape to fault, either for hypocrisy or abuse of power. after years behind the scenes, Jost itched to interviewing memorable characters like “Those are the subjects you’re trying to deal put his stand-up skills to use. The Update Kate McKinnon’s Angela Merkel. with,” he explains. “You don’t want to col- desk turned out to be the perfect fit, despite Another screen comedy challenge that Jost laterally damage victims.” He also says it’s his initial anxieties. “I didn’t feel the self- regularly grapples with is specific to SNL, important to refrain from becoming pedan- confidence I had on stage as a stand-up at which, true to its name and trademark line, tic or turning the segment into a moral les- SNL, and that was a hard, hard transition,” airs live. This means Jost and Che have to son; this means considering whether a joke he says. “I knew that I either had to try and be strategic when joking about news items will land with the audience or only make make Weekend Update work, or I would that are breaking or still raw, because there it appear the show is taking a serious topic have to go somewhere else to perform.” His isn’t a chance for do-overs. There’s no short- lightly. Such comic license can be a burden, signature deadpan and smirk, along with age of hot topics, from the Harvey Weinstein Jost says, given how much material there is his palpable chemistry with co-anchor sexual-abuse scandal to the Trump adminis- to choose from, “but it’s also really lucky,” Michael Che, have helped shape some of tration’s response to Hurricane Maria’s dev- because it’s an opportunity to elevate topics the segment’s most successful recent mo- astation of Puerto Rico. In cases like these, that really matter. It’s all about picking and ments, from roasting then-candidate Don- Jost says the trick is to pinpoint who’s at choosing the right jokes for the right issues. A Novel Take on Eternal Life Dara Horn breathes life into classical Jewish sources. by marina bolotnikova ara Horn ’99, Ph.D. ’06, would original subject in literature, but stories in suburban New Jersey and is now raising never choose to be immortal. In of eternal life, she says, “are almost never her family there, thought back to her own, her new novel, Eternal Life, this about fertile women.” In her novel, Hannah, repetitive domestic experience: “Who in D is the problem facing Rachel, a a gifted biologist who is researching life ex- their right mind would want to go through 2,000-year-old Jewish woman who made tension, discovers that her grandmother Ra- this again and again and again?” a bargain with the high priest at the Sec- chel has the telomeres of a teenager. While With Rachel’s life spanning Jewish so- ond Holy Temple: in exchange for the sur- reading about advances in anti-aging for cieties—continually dying yet reborn after vival of her sick son, she gives up her own the book, Horn, who spent her childhood each disaster—from the Roman Empire to death. “What reasons are there for Dara Horn modern Israel, Eternal Life reads as a being alive?” Rachel asks herself over metaphor for Jewish history. The nov- the centuries. None of them—to love el also reflects the contrast between God; to serve others; to feel joy, to the Judaic and American relation- build for the future—has any meaning ships to time, says Horn. “In the Unit- without the constraints of a normal ed States we have this mythology that human lifespan. As she watches her your past doesn’t matter—that’s the dozens of husbands and children die premise of the American experiment. before she does, her relationship with The premise of Judaism is exactly the God comes to feel “sadomasochistic.” opposite, because the founding my- Eternal Life might be the most fan- thology of Judaism is that when God tastical of Horn’s books, but it also gave the Torah to the Israelites at emerges most directly from her daily Mount Sinai, it wasn’t just that gen- life. “Something I’ve noticed was that eration of Israelites that was present, friends of mine with smaller families but all their future descendants were become very nostalgic as their chil- present. The most important thing in dren grow up and pass milestones,” your life happened thousands of years she says. “This is not at all my experi- before you were born.” ence. I’m a mother of four young chil- Horn moonlights as a professor of dren, and when you have that many Jewish literature (she has held the children, you keep going to preschool Weinstock visiting professorship in graduations over and over again. You Jewish studies at Harvard), and her just keep resetting the clock: ‘Oh, it’s novels, five in all, have been recog- the first day of kindergarten again!’” nized for their engagement with the Immortality is not a particularly texts she has worked on academically, Photograph by Michael B. Priest Harvard Magazine 55 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746.