When Emmy 2018 co-hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che sat down with Jimmy Fallon for the Tonight Show on Wednesday night, the conversation veered quickly away from television and towards the old movies that Che has recently watched.
When Fallon asked how the two Saturday Night Live co-head writers were feeling about the Emmys gig, Jost replied, “intimidated,” while Jost took a different approach.
“I was trying to talk to any other black guys that hosted, but it’s like Murphy, Gumbel and Cosby,” Che said. When Jost asked him what Gumbel said, Che joked, “He said call Cosby.”
Jost then added, “I don’t watch a lot of shows, I see like old movies. I finally saw Pretty Woman.” He explained, “Someone told me to watch it. They were wrong.” Che then went on to call it “maybe the worst movie I’ve ever seen” and dumped on the premise, in which Richard Gere’s businesswoman pays a prostitute played by Julia Roberts to stay in his hotel for six days.
“Finally he has to be with this woman for six days, did everything else, and finally he gets to kiss that sweet, sweet prostitute mouth. Six days later, and it’s some kind of fairy tale? Boo,” Che joked.
He had kinder things to say about what he called “Star Wars 2,” to which Jost replied, “As no one’s ever referred to that.”
When Fallon offered that the second Star Wars film, in terms of release date, was The Empire Strikes Back, Che countered, “No one’s ever said, ‘I like Police Academy: Citizens on Patrol.'”
The lighthearted conversation steered mostly clear of the hosts’ opinions on awards shows in general: Jost has come under fire in recent days for remarks he made in The Los Angeles Times in a pre-Emmys interview, where he said awards shows are “just adults getting trophies.”
“I think most of the time they’re way too self-serious and focused on things that 99 percent of the country doesn’t care about. At the end of the day, it’s adults getting trophies. Why should that be taken seriously?” Jost told the Times. “And remember when movies like Gladiator won best picture? Why can’t good, fun things win and not just good artsy things? They’re both good, and the fun ones are sometimes a lot harder to make.”
It was just the latest remark that landed Jost in trouble with readers: A few days earlier, social media lit up about a joke Jost made about the #MeToo movement in Vanity Fair. “I think that by [the Emmys], people are going to be desperate to give men a chance, finally,” he said. “It’ll probably be #HeToo by then.”
The pair then played “Most Likely To” with Fallon, where they agreed Che was most likely to Google himself and do his own laundry, Jost was most likely to lose his phone and they both were likely to give a birthday gift.
Jost recalled receiving a “birthday clown” at an “intimate birthday dinner” and an elaborate Hawkeye costume from Che.
“Because your girlfriend’s Black Widow,” Che said, referring to Avengers actress Scarlett Johansson. When Jost countered that Black Widow is not in a relationship with Hawkeye in The Avengers movies, Jost said, “I haven’t seen the movie.”
“They always say, ‘Watch The Avengers after Pretty Woman,'” Jost joked.
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