The Very Funny Comic Who Just Became the Next Weekend Update Anchor

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The Very Funny Comic Who Just Became the Next Weekend Update Anchor
By David Haglund at Slate

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/09/12/michael_che_weekend_update_anchor_for_saturday_night_live_is_very_funny.html

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Whatever the future holds for Strong, it is obviously bright for Che, as has become increasingly clear over the last two years. I first saw him perform in June 2012, as the first person up at an alternative comedy show in Brooklyn. No one seemed to have heard of him. (I hadn’t.) But I suspect I was not the only person who left that night talking about how he was the funniest person there. A few months later he was on Letterman and was profiled in the New York Times. He got hired to write on Saturday Night Live and then was picked up as a correspondent on The Daily Show. You may have seen his funny bit about finding a safe place to deliver the news as a black reporter.

Che only began doing stand-up in 2009, at age 26, after flaming out as an independent T-shirt designer. As Brian Koppelman discussed with Mike Birbiglia on his podcast The Moment, that fairly fast rise has inspired jealousy among some comics. But Che seems well-suited to the Update desk. As a stand-up, he’s more a joke-smith than a storyteller, and he gets a lot of mileage out of a droll delivery style that can make even so-so material pretty amusing. A lot of his material, which he has honed with a fairly grueling performance schedule, is much better than so-so. Two years ago, he won me over with jokes about how, growing up in a Lower East Side housing project, he couldn’t complain about not having enough—because his homeless friend Dave had even less.

Later I saw Che kill at the Comedy Cellar with a joke about how he prefers “like” to “love,” a routine that made it into that New York Times profile:


“People kill their loved ones all the time. Nobody ever kills people they like, though. Nobody’s watching you sleep through your bedroom window because you’re ‘pretty cool.’ ”



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