Colin Jost takes the sketch artists down!

MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2024

Straight outta Staten Island: For what it's worth, we disagree with Jason Zinoman's assessment of Colin Jost's performance at Saturday night's TV dinner.

(That doesn't mean that Zinowitz's assessment is "wrong.")

We thought Colin Jost was good. We'll score this as his best joke:

It is the best time in history to be a courtroom sketch artist. My God, the most famous man on Earth is on trial, and there’s no cameras allowed. Just the artists, their pastels and their desire to make Trump look as bad as possible.

We're omitting the tag line, which didn't rise to the level of the joke. 

We're imagining that the joke about the Gotham sketch artists came straight outta Staten Island. Jost grew up in that wild island province, with a family inheritance he mentioned Saturday night, to great effect.

The leading authority on Jost's family background tells us this:

Colin Jost was born and raised in New York City in the Grymes Hill neighborhood of Staten Island. His mother, Kerry J. Kelly, was the chief medical officer for the New York City Fire Department, and his father, Daniel A. Jost, was a teacher at Staten Island Technical High School.

His grandfather was a Staten Island firefighter too, as he described in moving detail at the end of his presentation. 

Just a guess! That kind of background may give a performer eyes to see the way the world may look—not necessarily crazily—to those on The Other Side of the current continental divide. We liked that particular joke because it crossed that type of line.

We also liked his early, well-delivered joke about "Doug," along with the way he quickly brought it all back home to his own status as a type of "second gentleman." Returning to the leading authority, we like what the highlighted line may seem to imply:

Jost names Norm Macdonald as a primary influence for his Update anchor work. Macdonald's tone was the one Jost grew up with in high school. He also names Tina Fey as an influence.

We have one semi-small complaint about Fey—a semi-small complaint derived from her feature film, Mean Girls. But in our view, she has a very level of wit. 

(For ourselves, the two most impressive sets we ever saw were both performed by Paula Poundstone. They're tied with the set we saw Dana Carey perform in San Francisco in the summer of '85. That was the original Church Lady comedy club set, which carried a thoroughly different punch from the way it was recreated for SNL after Carvey arrived there.)

We thought Jost was good in a very challenging assignment. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the New York Times offered this (perfectly reasonable) retrospective about the late Kenny DeForest, a little-known but highly regarded comedian who recently died very young:

What’s So Funny About a Dead Comedian?
Kenny DeForest was beloved among his fellow stand-ups. After his sudden death, they came together to grieve—and to confront comedy’s eternal question: Too soon?

As we noted over the weekend, the Times decided at some point to treat stand-up as an art form. That article approaches stand-up as a cultural phenomenon and as a lifestyle. 

We'll admit that the journalistic framework sketched by those headlines strikes us as a bit odd. That said, we'll renew our earlier request:

As the Times is presenting reports of that type, is there any reason why they can't report on the extremely strange comedy stylings which now drive a great deal of the work on the Fox News Channel?

That channel's termagant delivers jokes, every night, which are unmistakably misogyny-adjacent. Millions of people watch what he does. Should the Times be averting its gaze?

Jost was influenced by Tina Fey? Good for Colin Jost! Three cheers for Tina Fey!