A Saturday Night Live season is not complete without a joke — however subtle — dedicated to Colin Jost’s wife, actress Scarlett Johansson.
On the Saturday, December 14, episode, cast member Andrew Dismukes offered up a brief joke about Johansson, 40, being the breadwinner in her and Jost’s marriage.
Dismukes, 29, portrayed a “bald man” during the “Weekend Update” segment, sharing his take on the new U.K. court ruling barring harassment toward men with hair loss struggles. At one point, Dismukes pretended to use a towel to wipe off his bare head.
“You think this is funny, Colin? I got to carry around a little shame in case my head gets wet,” Dismukes quipped. “[I] dare you to laugh. Love to see your ass in court.”
He added, “My hairless little hands on some of your wife’s Marvel money!”
Jost, 42, quickly cut off Dismukes to end the segment, while bursting into laughter.
Jost, the co-anchor of SNL’s “Weekend Update,” has been married to Johansson since 2020. They initially met on the set of the NBC variety show. (Johansson, of course, is perhaps best known for her role as Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff in a cross-section of Marvel films, including 2021’s Black Widow.)
“We laugh a lot and we communicate with one another and check in,” Johansson, who shares son Cosmo with Jost, said on CBS Mornings in June 2023. “I’m married to a writer, he’s a comedy writer. He can get, like, very in his head sometimes, he’s sort of introverted. I’m extroverted, and so I think the key for us is just always checking in, just asking at the end of the day, ‘How was your day?’”
Johansson also understands that their life can become fodder for SNL jokes.
“I now rarely watch [SNL] without having a sense of … not overwhelming panic, just like a slight underwhelming panic because I just feel like at any moment something’s going to fall apart,” Johansson previously said during a July 2021 appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “And that’s the excitement of SNL and for all audiences, right? Because it’s absolutely live.”
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Colin Jost and Michael Che’s annual “joke swap” segment on Saturday Night Live may be a tradition, but it’s one Jost’s wife Scarlett Johansson wanted no part of. Johansson, 39, said she “blacked out” upon seeing her photo during the “Weekend Update” segment where Jost, 42, and Che, 41, write outrageous jokes for each other […]
She continued at the time: “But when you’re emotionally invested in it and not just entertained by it, it takes on a little bit of a different life.”
In addition to Dismukes’ subtle joke about Johansson’s Marvel salary on Saturday, the actress has famously been name-dropped in other “Weekend Update” segments. Jost’s cohost, Michael Che, often sneaks a reference into their annual holiday joke-swap on yearly Christmas episodes.
Saturday Night Live airs on NBC Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET.