Colin Jost performs live from the Adams Playhouse
Colin Jost, comedian and head writer for Saturday Night Live, performs a stand-up comedy show for Hofstra students. // Photo courtesy of University Relations .
Colin Jost, a comedian, actor and writer who grew up on Staten Island made it from the stage of Saturday Night Live (SNL) to the John Cranford Adams Playhouse’s stage on Wednesday, Sept. 7, to perform a stand-up comedy show for Hofstra University students.
The performance was organized by the Student Government Association (SGA) as part of September Welcome, a month-long series of back-to-school events.
“SGA was interested in creating a signature event for the September Welcome calendar and discussed several options for a guest speaker or comedian, but our leadership team agreed upon Colin Jost as a special guest to kick off the month-long programming series,” said Severino Randazzo, director of Student Leadership and Engagement. “We were really pleased when he confirmed the event, especially since he’s busy preparing for the new season of SNL and just wrapped a comedy tour.”
Jost works as a head writer on SNL, where he began writing in 2005. Additionally, he has been a co-anchor of “Weekend Update” with Michael Che since 2014. In total, Jost has 12 Emmy Award nominations, won five Writers Guild Awards and two Peabody Awards, according to his website.
The show started with Jost sharing his own college experiences from when he went to Harvard and majored in Russian literature. He talked about the quirks of his freshman year roommates, which many students were able to relate to.
Jost was hugely interactive with the audience and answered their questions about his personal life. One audience member asked where Jost and Scarlett Johansson, his wife, got their baby’s name.
“We woke up in the middle of night because our carbon monoxide detector was going off, and I went to see about it as though I knew how to deal with carbon monoxide,” Jost said. “While Scarlett was awake, she was looking at baby names, and she found ‘Cosmo.’ Rose is my stepdaughter and Scarlett’s daughter, and cosmos [are] a type of flower. So we just started calling him that, and when he came out we were like, ‘Wait, are we just going with this?’”
Jost joked about how every student will most likely start with one major and change it to something completely different, except pre-med students, who will probably still become doctors.
Angad Dev, a junior biology major (left), Abby Kolakowski, a senior biology major (center left), Ettiman Kaur, a senior biology major (center right), and Gayathri Suresh, a sophomore computer science major, hold up signs to show Colin Jost that they love him.
“I think it was really funny that he was bashing pre-med [students] because, as a pre-med [student], I related so hard,” said Ettiman Kaur, a senior biology major.
Audience members also invited Jost to go to Catch, a bar and grill in Hempstead, after the show. One student went as far as inviting Jost to sleep on his futon if things got “too crazy.”
Kaur added that hearing Jost talk about Catch improved the experience because a famous person talked about places relating to Hofstra students.
“I felt like he knows where Hofstra is,” said Angad Dev, a junior biology major. “Like Hofstra is on the map. It’s not just a random school. Colin Jost knows where Hofstra is. People are going to know; like ScarJo is going to know where Hofstra is.”
Toward the end of the stand-up, Jost shared some of his ideas for SNL sketches that did not make it on the show. He wrote one sketch about a company that tells you about your dog’s breed ancestry, but when the results come back it only says, “It’s a dog.” Another sketch idea he shared was for a game show where people try to guess what food they left in the office fridge before the pandemic began.
Jost admitted that the Hofstra audience was one of the best crowds that he has performed in front of. Whether that was a joke is still up for debate.
