With Seth Meyers leaving Saturday Night Live next month to take over NBC’s Late Night, his spot as “Weekend Update” co-anchor is up for grabs. SNL’s head writer, Colin Jost, has been named as Meyers’s replacement, THR reports. Meyers’s last episode will be February 1st, while Jost will take over as co-anchor alongside Cecily Strong on the following episode, after the Winter Olympics on March 1st. Strong was added as Seth Meyers’s co-host in the fall to help with the transition and to make it a double-anchor segment again.
Jost is the eighth new cast member to be added to SNL this season, following Beck Bennett, John Milhiser, Kyle Mooney, Michael Patrick O’Brien, Noël Wells, and Brooks Wheelan in the fall and Sasheer Zamata last week. For over a decade now, “Weekend Update” has been anchored or co-anchord by SNL’s head writer. Tina Fey took the segment over in 2000, Seth Meyers replaced her in 2006, and with Jost being named Meyers’s replacement, this is an unbroken streak of the show’s head writer sitting behind the “Update” desk.
Jost, former president of the Harvard Lampoon, was hired to write for SNL in 2005. He became the show’s co-head writer in the fall of 2012. Jost has done standup on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show and he frequently opens for Seth Meyers at live standup gigs. He wrote the movie Staten Island Summer, which filmed last year and is awaiting release. It’s a Lorne Michaels-produced teen comedy that Jost also plays a supporting role in. He currently serves as SNL’s co-head writer alongside Seth Meyers and Rob Klein.
Check out Jost doing standup on Fallon below:
