Blame his better half. Colin Jost set the record straight about a well-placed prop that snuck into the background of a Saturday Night Live episode in April.
The comedian, 38, got a handful of negative comments about a very visible guitar that was left on his couch during his “Weekend Update” segment on the April 11 episode of the variety show, which was filmed from home during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Two months later, he claimed fiancée Scarlett Johansson was the culprit.
“Scarlett had that guitar forever and it was in the quarantine,” Jost explained in a New York Times interview, which was published on Wednesday, July 8. “She was like, ‘Maybe I should learn how to play,’ and just left it on the couch. It was so perfectly framed there and then everyone pointed it out and I was like, ‘How can I be so dumb?’ I had no awareness of it at all.”
Hours before the penultimate episode of SNL‘s 45th season aired on April 25, the New York native issued a candid clap back to the followers who thought he put the instrument there on purpose in the previous show.
“My favorite observation from last episode, even among my fellow cast members, was: ‘Great job including the guitar, douchebag.’ This might sound incomprehensible but I did not know it was on the couch, let alone perfectly framed behind me,” he teased via Instagram. “I have never, nor do I pretend to play, the guitar. Nor do I physically understand how it works.”
Johansson, 35, and the Very Punchable Face author got engaged in May 2019 after two years of dating. The pair met in 2010 when the Oscar nominee appeared in a sketch Jost wrote for her third time hosting SNL. Though they appear to be a perfect fit, they don’t always agree on everything. During an April interview with Parade magazine, Johansson revealed the one thing that really comes between them: baseball.
“It’s a sore subject,” the longtime New York Yankees fan said of her Mets-loving fiancé. “He just told me that he’d rather see the [Boston] Red Sox win than the Yankees win. Like, what?! I said I was just going to ignore that.”
The Marvel star was previously married to Ryan Reynolds from 2008 to 2011 and to Romain Dauriac from 2014 to 2017. She shares daughter Rose, 5, with the French journalist, 38, and Jost feels ready to take on the big responsibility of being a stepparent.
“I’m about to get married. I now almost have a stepdaughter who I love and is a big part of my life now. I’m starting to do more and more outside of the show,” he told the New York Times, hinting that he felt like he had come to “the end of what felt like a defined chapter” in his life.
