Michael Che and Colin Jost — co-anchors of SNL’s Weekend Update, the grand-daddy of fake TV newscasts — think Donald Trump is a lot of things. He’s a flim-flam artist, a racial flamethrower, a selfish jerk who hasn’t done a thing for anybody but himself, a guy who shouldn’t be allowed near the Oval Office unless he’s accompanied by certified tour guide.

But there’s one insult, often hurled at the GOP nominee, they simply cannot abide.

“What bothers me, when people make it seem like, ‘You know what? I’m smarter than Donald Trump,’” said Che, sitting in a conference room at the show’s 30 Rock headquarters last week during a taping for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast. “Like no, you’re not, all right? He’s a smart guy… And he living room. He speaks bar.”

Jost interrupted: “And he’s probably harder working than you.”

Moreover, Che thinks it’s counterproductive to ridicule Trump and his populist posse, in a don’t-piss-‘em-off kind of way: “I really think it doesn’t help Hillary’s cause when people say all his supporters are dumb and racist, because if you’re his supporters, if you are dumb and racist, you just get angrier.”

I can’t quite figure out if their opinions on Trump are a product of principled comedic objectivity or a necessary commercial imperative — along the lines of Michael Jordan’s Democrats-and-Republicans-but-sneakers pronouncement in the 1990s. Why alienate the consumer base if you can avoid it, right?

But neither of the 30-something comedian-writers believes Trump should be president, and they say so. Therein, the paradox: They have been around both presidential candidates in the studio, and think Trump is an odd man, but charming, funny, plenty bright and more innately adorable than the uber-dignified Clinton. But the prospect of him running America?

“Should he be president? No,” says Che, a cool, controlled performer who is welcoming and unguarded during unscripted conversation. “But let’s not pretend that this guy is a mutant, you know, and he’s the most evil, racist, mutant piece of crap that ever walked. Listen, there’s probably somebody in your building way worse than Donald Trump, and you buy bagels from him, and it’s fine. You know what I mean? I don’t think he’s racist. I think he’s a salesman. I think he’s a salesman playing to the most racist segment of the country.”

Off-air, the pair are for-real friends comfortable finishing each other’s sentences, partners who cap 12-hour writing sessions with a “where do you want to go for dinner?” But on-air there’s emotional air-conditioning, an ever-so-slight tension between the copy-paper-white Harvard graduate (Jost) and the wise-ass black kid from the projects (Che). They are probably personally closer than the more famous — and more overtly affectionate — duo of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, but they have a chillier, more cutting relationship in front of the cameras that reflects their disparate backgrounds as black and white kids growing up in the big city.

They are politically simpatico, but Che goes there in a way Jost won’t, or can’t. During Saturday night’s season premier, Jost seemed genuinely shocked when Che casually uttered the N-word during a segment on NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who takes a knee during the national anthem to protest violence against black men by cops.

Jost, 34, is from Staten Island, and is a touch sensitive about its reputation as a provincial valley between Brooklyn and Jersey. “It’s a great place where one of the wealthiest men in history came from, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Maybe you’ve heard of him,” he said.

To which Che replies, “Yeah. I think he owned my grandfather.”

Jost’s mother is New York municipal royalty. Kerry Kelly is the chief medical officer for the Fire Department, and thus responsible for monitoring the mounting health care problems of first responders at Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, and she was anything but a bystander that day. Like so many other city cops and firefighters, Kelly rushed downtown at the first word that a plane had struck the World Trade Center, and she was trapped, for several excruciating hours, in a building that was buried in rubble when one of the towers collapsed. Jost had just started attending Harvard at the time, and found out about his mother’s close call after the fact.

“She was at the bottom of the first tower when it collapsed, and a fireman pushed her to the side of an alcove of a building,” he recalled. “They were both buried for a couple hours and got dug out, and then she immediately went to work. She set up like a clinic in a Duane Reade that was down there and, like, was helping people. So she didn’t go home for three days.”

Jost’s fellow cast member and Staten Islander, 22-year-old comedy prodigy Pete Davidson, was in grade school when his father, Scott Davidson, was killed responding to the attack in the towers, one of 343 firefighters to make the ultimate sacrifice. Few cast members have ever shared a similar bond, and the current cast, as a group (including Long Island native Kate McKinnon, who plays Hillary Clinton) are New Yorkier than most.

Che’s full name is Che Guevera Campbell (named after the South American revolutionary whose visage was on every third T-Shirt in the Manhattan of Che’s youth). He grew up plenty poor in the Al Smith projects, a thicket of dun brick buildings jammed between City Hall and the East River, an island of black families pushed to the water’s edge in mostly white and Asian Lower Manhattan.

Che, 33, was always an artistic kid, the youngest of seven, and his mother tried to shield him from the violence in the projects, albeit unsuccessfully. One of his earliest memories was watching, as a kindergartner, as a young Dominican man walking in front of him has his head blown off. He was a gifted painter, loved to sketch, adored the bright splash of acrylic and oil paints, and tested into the highly competitive LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts (the school the movie and TV series Fame was based on).

He was a late bloomer. After high school, he drifted, working at a Toyota dealership in the city, selling his canvasses and painted T-Shirts (black rock stars and actors were favored subjects) on a corner in SoHo. But it was his quick, angry-but-not-too-angry wit that made him stand out, and he eventually gravitated to stand-up, and that eventually led to an SNL writing gig, then a turn on Comedy Central’s Daily Show and, finally, the on-air pairing with Jost.

The Black Lives Matter movement is no abstraction to Che. He’s dealt with stop-and-frisk pat-downs and white suspicion all of his life — and it hasn’t really stopped despite his semi-fame. “If a cop pulls me over I feel like most black guys feel… you almost assume that it’s going to be a terrible experience, and you’re fine with it,” he told me. “You don’t even brace yourself. You’re just like, ‘This is going to suck.’ There’s no one I’m going to call. There’s no letter I’m going to write afterward…You’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. And this f—in cop beat me up.’ It’s just a thing.”

Doormen harass him routinely, even more than police officers (his brother is in the NYPD, so he cuts them considerable slack). When he worked for John Stewart at the The Daily Show and went out to do a field report, a doorman barred his way into a building — even though he was wearing a suit and his white crew were dressed in raggedy jeans and sneakers.

“I just want to point out, I’m very popular with doormen,” Jost interjects.

Most real TV news types bore the hell out fake TV news types, but Che and Jost get off on the camp of cable. Especially Chris Matthews. They love the guy, much like they love Trump, because he’s weird and expects everyone he meets to bow to his eccentricity.

At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the MSNBC host opened an interview by asking Che, “What do you think, funniest guy — funniest black guy?”

Che said he was into Bill Cosby. Matthews offered a response that implied he thought the disgraced comedian was already dead.

“He’s the purest sense of funny because he’s funny without trying to be funny. He’s just himself,” Che said, with a big laugh.

“He’s a liberal Trump,” added Jost — and he noted that Matthews had their names phonetically spelled in his Teleprompter, but still managed to screw them up. “Oh, my God, he took out a bag of off-brand M&M’s right before we go on air, and he puts them on the— he goes, ‘You guys want some candy, some sugar?’ and we were like— and I said something like, ‘Oh, that probably gives you energy, right?’ And he goes, ‘Are you making fun of me?’ I mean, that was the hardest I’ve laughed in a while.”

Neither Che nor Jost especially likes politics. But they love making jokes about politicians, whom they view as the most unintentionally funny people on the planet.

Trump hosted the show last fall, at a time when the developer-turned-reality-TV-star seemed like a clown-car afterthought. Jost, to his surprise, found himself mesmerized by the massive figure — always dressed in a dark suit and long red tie — sitting in the green room for hours on end, tossing out random observations to whoever walked by, like a barber bitching during his lull hours.

“I hung out with him more than any host. He was here at least as much, if not more, than every other host to the point where we were like, ‘Are you also campaigning right now? What’s going on?’ recalled Jost.

“Ivanka came for a little while and hung out, but really, he was alone,” he added. “You’d walk into his dressing room; the door would be open. And he’d say like, ‘Oh, did you see this thing with Ben Carson?’ It would just be like, ‘What an idiot!’ He was on his phone, reading newspapers or printouts. He was also looking at scripts and giving notes… He’s very superficial in a sense of he’s just like, ‘Oh, here’s what I’m thinking now’ – or – ‘Oh, what about that thing?’ ‘Oh, I like this. I like those shoes. I love that hat. Good face. I like that face!’ Stuff like that, and you’re like, ‘OK.’ He’s a self-centered person.”

Che cut in: “He didn’t say ‘good face’ to me.”

And the man who has spent the past week whining about a sabotaged debate microphone wasn’t especially demanding. He trusted the writers, and only tweaked the script only when he thought something would make him look silly. “I don’t think he likes to look silly,” Jost said.

Around the same time, Hillary Clinton stopped for her now-famous “Val the Bartender” bit, with an entourage second in size only to the swarm LeBron James brought with him when hosting.

Clinton came over to Jost and offered a hug — she knew his mother from her days as New York senator pushing for increased funding for first-responder health legislation. When Che met her he was impressed by how likable she was, just a “charming, bubbly lady” sitting in a chair.

But she wasn’t really fun. Trump, he just is.

“I mean, she’s got a different kind of presence,” Che told me. “There’s like— when Hillary is in the building, you know it blocks and blocks away. That’s a Clinton. You know what I mean? She f–ks up traffic. Trump ain’t going to f–k up traffic. He just walks in, in his suit, and a brown paper bag. Combs and gum. His Trident gum.”

Jost arches an eyebrow, and meditates on the difference between the two people vying to run the free world.

“Yeah, yeah…He did have a lot of mints and gum.”

---

Comments are closed.