On Wednesday, Jeopardy! will step into a new era with a pop culture spinoff on—stop what you’re doing and call your mom; she needs to reset her password now—Amazon’s streaming platform, Prime. Pop Culture Jeopardy! will represent the first time that the Alex Trebek Stage has seen true team competition, with each episode featuring three teams of three contestants squaring off over Marvel, memes, memorabilia, and myriad other bits and bobs of modern life.
A whole new Jeopardy! means a whole new host. Enter writer and comedian Colin Jost, who has hosted Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” since 2014. The Ringer gave Jost a call to talk about headlining a brand-new spin on a trusty quiz recipe, getting tips from syndicated host Ken Jennings, how an SNL tradition offered unexpected support, and what it’s like to drill a whopping 243 contestants over the course of 40 episodes. For those keeping score at home: That’s 2,440 twisty Jeopardy! clues for Jost to master, with one $300,000 grand prize waiting at the end.
But first, Jost had to learn how to manage another task: joining a conference call in 2024.
[Colin Jost, joining the call.] Hi, it’s Colin.
Hey there, Colin. This is Claire McNear from The Ringer. How are you?
I didn’t know if I was recording a message.
I think every single person who’s joined this call has had the exact same confusion.
That’s why I’m not the announcer.
Johnny Gilbert is hard to beat. Did you grow up in a Jeopardy! household?
I grew up watching with my parents and my grandparents. We watched it most nights, and it felt like it was just part of our lives. I never think I’m necessarily that good at trivia, but I really did like playing along and felt like I knew a decent number of answers. I still watch it whenever I have a chance. It's just such a timeless, perfectly constructed game.
I also loved Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Those are the two sort of gold-star versions of games that I always loved even before meeting [current Jeopardy! executive producer and Millionaire producer] Michael Davies.
You already had your own game show in the works before Pop Culture Jeopardy!, right?
[“Weekend Update” cohost] Michael Che and I are developing a game show with Michael [Davies], and that’s how I met him—not knowing at all his involvement in Millionaire, not knowing that he was doing Jeopardy! Those were my reference points. I wanted a game that had great trivia to it and was a serious trivia game. I didn’t want to ever do a game show that felt gimmicky or too game-based, like physical games or anything. I wanted to have an intellectual component because that’s what I loved about watching Jeopardy!
Given your time at SNL, when Pop Culture Jeopardy! came around, did you think at all about “Black Jeopardy!” or Will Ferrell’s Celebrity Jeopardy! sketches?
Of course! Of course. That may play into an episode at some point. Who knows?
Did you ask Kenan Thompson for pointers?
I should have. I should ask him generally for pointers because he’s the best.
OK, so if not drilling with Kenan, how did you prepare?
I watched a bunch of old episodes from different eras and just got a sense of the flow of it. What I always realized, even before coming in there, is the game itself is really the star of the show. It’s constructed so well that you just want to get out of the way. You don’t interrupt gameplay too much, and you want to get right into the game as quickly as possible. And if you watch any regular episode of Jeopardy! through the years, that’s what the hosts do really well. The biggest thing to train with was just getting the gameplay down in real time.
Did your SNL training help at all?
One thing they told me is how when they’ve had guest hosts, they’ve had some that just are not as good at cold reading. You’re reading 61 clues in a game, then you suddenly have a lot of cold reading that you’re doing. You see everything in advance, but you still never know what order it’s going to pop up in.
So weirdly, a thing that prepared me very well for it was the joke swap that we do at SNL, because I’m also cold-reading that, and it’s live. I weirdly had confidence from being forced to do that by Michael Che. It gave me confidence: If you don’t want to read a clue, I was at least not going to be in racial jeopardy.
I spoke with Michael Davies, and he said he was impressed by how much you marked up your Jeopardy! scripts ahead of taping. What kinds of things were you writing down?
Some were performance things of where I wanted emphasis to be. Some were how I would remember how to pronounce a tricky name. And some things were maybe an idea for a comment that I could make in the moment depending on what someone’s answer might be or possible wrong answers that could be funny. Or if there was something that might be a runner through the game depending on how the order of the categories ended up. Having never hosted it before, I was just trying to be thorough and put work in to feel like I had the most possible comfort going in, because once the game is going, your focus is so much on the integrity of the game and wanting it to be paced up and for there not to be any weird pauses.
You have to be really confident as the host saying yes or no. In a way, it’s almost better to be confident and wrong and have someone toss it out and say, “No, that was actually right,” rather than just kind of looking at them like, “Hmmm, maybe that’s an answer.” I just wanted to feel like I had a reasonable mastery of the material so that there could be fun moments that came outside of that.
I would get up early to read some games at home and travel in and read some with the writers and then go through all of them before the first start. I’m sure I’m a lot less efficient at it than Ken Jennings is. He probably also knows a lot more answers than I do.
How much of the joking around on Pop Culture Jeopardy! is material you’ve prepared ahead of time as opposed to things you’re improvising in the moment?
I would say more improvising because the jokes mostly come out of natural moments. A lot of it’s just reacting to how the contestants respond, which you have no idea of in advance, obviously. You have no idea who is going to guess or what they’re going to say. There were maybe one or two things in a game that I had in my back pocket going into it. But even then, I didn’t know whether it was going to make sense in the moment.
Tell me about working with Jeopardy!’s writers. They stood in as contestants during a few practice games, right?
That was really fun. The writers were so impressive—they’re obviously so intelligent. But they were really supportive, because for me, I was coming into their world. They’re such a well-oiled machine, and I’m coming in and learning. For them, it’s another few weeks among all these hundreds of other shows they have to do. So they could have very easily just been going through the motions and getting these three weeks over with and continuing their jobs. But they were very welcoming.
They actually really participated in the practice games. They tried to very subtly, in a supportive way, stump me or throw a wrench into the game.
How so?
Say an answer to a question is the Pixies song “Where Is My Mind?” If the answer itself is a question, then you don’t have to say, “What is ‘Where Is My Mind?’” As a new host, because you’re so trained by the Jeopardy! rhythm, you want to say, “No, what is ‘Where Is My Mind?’” And that’s not technically necessary. There are so many little technicalities, and everyone’s going to get certain things wrong. I think even someone who’s been hosting it for 30 years gets things wrong, but you want to be prepared for every possibility.
And they were just fun to hang with. They were very open to feedback if a clue sounded strange to me or read weird or just didn’t seem as interesting or fresh as maybe another option that they had. They were certainly always trying to make the material better. They obviously see so much material, so they know what might feel stale to regular Jeopardy! viewers and what might seem like a fresher kind of clue.
Did they know you were going to host when the games were being written?
They wrote all the clues not knowing who the host was going to be. So it was weird. There were times where it was funny—there would be things about my colleagues or my friends that came up, and they were totally benign, but it was just funny to see them. Or clues about my wife. At some point, you’re almost like, I think they shouldn’t have some clue involving my wife in every episode. It was completely by chance. It turns out she’s in a lot of movies.
Overall, how does Pop Culture compare to regular Jeopardy!?
I found Pop Culture Jeopardy! harder than regular Jeopardy! I was really impressed. You have to have a breadth of knowledge for all that’s within pop culture. You have to know different eras really well. I was fascinated when no one would know something from the ’90s or no one would know something from the early 2000s. … Maybe that’s also just generational because there were a lot of younger groups [competing]. Pop culture is so different for everyone in what sticks with them, and especially modern things can get very divided because, almost in an algorithmic way, your experience with culture is so fragmented.
I’m trying to think of one of the ones that I didn’t even have a reference point for. There was a whole category getting deeper into anime. I don’t have a lot of current anime knowledge.
How was it working with the contestants? In a typical Jeopardy! game, people are often very nervous and stressed out. It seems like it was a lighter atmosphere for this.
It was. I really loved the three-person teams because it had a little bit of a feeling of bar trivia. Visually it was also interesting to see how teams dressed—some teams are in full costume, and some teams just had the same color shirt.
There was definitely a different level of excitement among the contestants because they were with their friends. Or some people had never met their partners before—they met online, and then this was the first time they had ever met in person. And there were teams that had, like, one of them used to date a person in the group, but then they left that person and started dating the other one in the group. There are some weird love triangles happening. It felt like there was a love triangle in every episode. It was like an ad for Hinge or something.
Are you a bar trivia person?
I used to be. I miss it. I might start doing more of it again. I used to have a good, I thought, pretty high-level team. I was probably the worst member.
Was this with other SNL people?
No. There have been some SNL teams—when I started [in 2005], there were. This was actually friends from college—from the Lampoon, which was this magazine I wrote for in college. There was a group of us when we first moved to New York.
I have a few last scattershot questions for you. The host of Jeopardy! always gets asked what their dream category would be if they were a contestant. What’s yours?
I think any dream category for me is also a potential nightmare category because I would feel like, Oh, that’s in my sweet spot, and then if I got a bunch of them wrong? Like 20th-century or 19th-century Russian literature—I should know a lot of poets and novels and even Russian essayists from that time. That should be a real sweet spot that maybe isn’t for everyone. But at this point, I feel like I’m so removed from all that knowledge I had that I’d be really scared.
We’ve seen comedians do really well on Celebrity Jeopardy! in recent years. Who’s a comedian you think would kill it on Jeopardy!?
It was really, really fun to see Ike [Barinholtz, who won Celebrity Jeopardy! in 2023], and he did fantastic. I bet Kate McKinnon would be very good. She’s a smart cookie. I bet she has a lot of specific knowledge in places you wouldn’t expect. Like, she’s written a YA novel. She’s someone who I just assume knows chemistry, and we don’t know why. Because she played a Ghostbuster, I just assume she’s good at chemistry. She’s my pick.
Last one. Do you have a favorite Jeopardy! contestant from any era?
Honestly, Ken Jennings. He was the first person I saw go on that kind of crazy run, at whatever age I was when that happened, and it was really just so exciting to watch. I was watching every night to see what would happen. I think that’s part of why he’s such a great host to me—he has that credibility that you know he probably knows everything.
There were some dubiously sourced tabloid reports when you were first announced as the host of Pop Culture Jeopardy! that you were gunning for Ken’s job. Does this mean you are not, in fact, trying to swipe the syndicated show?
I promise I am in no way trying to steal his job. He’s very good at his job. I also have a job. He and I texted during [Pop Culture Jeopardy!], actually.
What did you talk about?
He was just supportive. What he was saying is true—there’s almost no one that knows what it’s like to host the game. You know, all the crazy specific things you have to do in every game and keep track of, in addition to what just seems like normal hosting stuff. The gameplay of it is so specific and fast and precise that it’s just an experience that almost no one gets to have. It’s like talking to someone who used to host “Weekend Update”—it’s its own vocabulary and own experience that’s very specific.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
