Colin Jost is telling all. In his new memoir, A Very Punchable Face, the comedian, 38, opens up about his life — from growing up in Staten Island to landing a job at Saturday Night Live to getting engaged to Scarlett Johansson.
He will be ready to move on “in the near future” from his job at the NBC variety show, where he currently is a head writer, he says in the book.
“I’ve basically built an emotional escape hatch in my work and in my relationships, and my greatest fear — besides my trypophobia, or fear of holes — is leaving SNL and never finding anything I like doing more than SNL,” Jost, who joined the show in 2014, writes in the book. “The other part about leaving SNL is that it means growing up. Because no one who works at SNL is really an adult.”
Jost noted that his relationship with the Marriage Story actress, to whom he proposed in May 2019, has also changed his perspective on that.
“It’s certainly not a good place to work while you’re raising a family or nurturing a healthy relationship,” the comedian writes. “I’ve started to notice subtle changes in my life, like wanting to spend time with people who don’t work at SNL. Or wanting to attend human activities like birthdays, weddings, and dinners that start before 10 p.m. … I’ve met someone I love and who I feel more comfortable with than I ever have before. I feel more confident committing to what I’m working on and standing by whatever I create, regardless of whether people like it or not.”
The writer is also “ready to sleep semi-regular hours and write without constant swirling pressure of a live show every Saturday night,” he explains, “Working at SNL is a drug — it’s highly addictive, and if I don’t stop soon I think my mind will be wrapped in an irrevocable way. And while whatever I do next will almost certainly be less fun than SNL, it could also be better in some way I never expected.”
Jost shares that he’s grown a ton since he began at Saturday Night Live, so much so, that “I’ve even woken up on a Sunday after a show and thought, ‘I would love to be raising a baby right now!'”
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Scroll through the gallery below for more revelations from the book.