The trip turns out to be a disaster: He’s lonely, his host family neglects him, he’s too depressed to get any work done, he whiffs really hard with some Spanish girls, culminating in an incident where he vomits a plume of absinthe. Petersburg to translate a short story by one of his favorite authors. He describes this day as the happiest of his life.Īt Harvard, Jost studies Russian literature, an interest that leads him to travel to St. “It doesn’t matter if you grew up rich or your mom was on the Lampoon or your dad was Saddam Hussein.” It takes him three semesters and 80 rejected pieces to get one accepted by the magazine.
“Unlike most clubs at Harvard, it’s entirely merit-based,” he writes. Again, he is eager to assure us that this didn’t come easily. Jost attends Regis High School on the Upper East Side, which liberates him from the confines of his somewhat knuckleheaded Staten Island upbringing, exposing him to the city’s moneyed elite.* There, Jost competes on the speech and debate team, in a discipline called “original oratory.” This, we learn, is where he got his first taste of proto-stand-up, delivering “as many jokes as possible” hoping to get a judge who “wanted to laugh and not contemplate” the self-serious diatribes of his opponents.īeing funny in comparison to one’s stolid surroundings is the fuel for Rodney Dangerfield comedies, Da Ali G Show, and even Weekend Update it is also the foundational idea behind the Harvard Lampoon, the student publication-and feeder program for comedy writers-that Jost eventually comes to run as an undergraduate. This was back when he was just a head writer at Saturday Night Live: before I’d ever seen his blandly handsome face on my TV screen, before he became engaged to Scarlett Johansson, before I’d watched him deliver the joke news on Weekend Update-before I developed an unhealthy fixation on him, before I tweeted about him scores of times (in the pursuit of an ongoing bit where I pretended to see him as a righteous truth-teller), before I caught what I’ve come to think of as “SNL Disorder.”
In fact, he was slightly more forthcoming in the interview than in his own memoir according to my notes, still sitting in Google Drive where I left them, it was Jason Sudeikis who coined “Burger Jost.” The memory I’d suppressed was that Jost was an unusually generous and friendly interview subject, especially considering how asinine my questions were. I interviewed Jost on the phone about seven years ago, for a short, frivolous item in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he had related the same anecdote. Reading this, I was forced to confront something I’d long been aware of, but had spent years suppressing.
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