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Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost calls the week in 2015 when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump hosted the show “surreal,” and in retrospect not such a great idea.
Interviewed by Andrea Mitchell on her MSNBC show today, Jost said he wrote about the episode in his new memoir A Very Punchable Face (a reference to his own mug) to give readers a sense of what SNL‘s Trump Week was like behind the scenes. In the book, Jost writes that the Trump-hosted episode is “a real Confederate statue of entertainment” that “has not aged well, politically or comedically.”
Jost tells Mitchell he was surprised by how much time Trump devoted to rehearsals that week, considering he was in the middle of a presidential campaign. “He was fully in the middle of the campaign and somehow was also there hosting our show every day which is a pretty strange thing…”, Jost says. The candidate apparently spent more time at Studio 8H than guest host Justin Bieber did.
As for whether SNL will return to that studio this fall, or continue with remotely produced videos, Jost can’t say. “I don’t know yet,” he says, “but we’re going to do everything we can“ to return to the stage.
Watch the segment above.
