Despite a valiant, multi-year campaign of televised self-immolation culminating in a passionate endorsement of child molestation, network executives confirmed Monday that the “Weekend Update” co-anchor remains legally bound to the sketch comedy program.
To witness Michael Che and Colin Jost engage in their annual holiday joke swap is to observe a ritual of linguistic self-mutilation so profound, it rivals the most harrowing depths of the avant-garde. When Che, staring into the unforgiving lens of the broadcast camera, declared that he would have gladly paid Michael Jackson to molest him, he was not engaging in mere shock comedy; he was hurling himself against the electrified fence of modern broadcast standards, praying for the lethal, merciful voltage of network censure. Alas, the American viewing public remains stubbornly immune to his pleas, leaving the comedian trapped in his own success.
The sheer existential bleakness of the exercise—two men chained to a desk, reading atrocities aloud in a Sisyphean effort to be fired—mirrors the static, inescapable purgatory of Samuel Beckett’s canonical masterpiece Waiting for Godot; it echoes, for those of us initiated into the more punishing realms of European performance art, the visceral, bodily transgressions of Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater, while simultaneously recalling the frantic, ghost-hunting paralysis of the 2001 Nintendo GameCube launch title Luigi’s Mansion, wherein a terrified protagonist is forced to navigate a cursed estate against his will, armed only with a profound sense of regret. It is a tragedy of the highest order, neatly packaged between commercial breaks.
We recognize that these men are begging us, week after week, to cut their tethers and cast them into the void of cultural obsolescence, but as long as they continue to outperform late-night competitors in the key advertiser demographics, their suffering will continue uninterrupted.
One must pity the modern satirist, who finds himself trapped in an era where the public appetite for depravity has vastly outpaced the individual’s capacity to be canceled. Jost and Che have deployed every rhetorical weapon at their disposal—from endorsing structural racism to defending international war crimes—only to be met with the hollow, ringing applause of an audience that mistakes their desperate cries for help as mere late-night banter. Thus, the spectacle must continue; one can only assume that by next season, Jost will be forced to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping, all to the rapturous delight of a demographic that simply refuses to let them rest.