Michael Che Explains Why He Says He's Leaving 'SNL' at the End of Every Season

I haven’t always been a huge fan of Michael Che. But I am now. And I think that’s due to a combination of factors. He wasn’t great as an “Update” host in the beginning. It felt like he was trying to get a rise out of his critics early on, and it still does, but there’s a difference in the approach. It’s more playful now. Back then, it felt like “Screw you,” whereas now it feels almost self-deprecating. He and Jost have great chemistry. The joke swap ultimately changed the tenor of “Update,” and now the groaners feel earned instead of malevolent.

Or maybe it’s just that he’s been doing it for over a decade, he’s mastered the format, and we’ve collectively loosened up and given the man some latitude. I think early on, he tried too hard to be like Norm MacDonald, but over the years, he’s forged his own identity, which just happens to be Norm MacDonald adjacent.

Maybe he’s been around too long, but as a fan and as a constant critic of SNL, I still look forward to “Update” every week, and I think at this point Che and Jost are among the best to ever do it. When they’re having a good week, “Update” can be sublimely funny.

But without fail, near the end of every season for the last five or six years, rumors start to spread that Michael Che is leaving the show. And those rumors are always fueled by Michael Che himself. He outright says in stand-up shows and on social media that he’s leaving, that this is his last season, and yet every fall, he’s still there at the “Update” desk opposite Colin, making jokes at Colin’s expense.

This week, on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast, Birbiglia straight up asked him why he says he’s leaving at the end of every season, and Che was honest about it. It’s because by the end of the season, he actually thinks he’s not coming back. He compares it to his mother spending days preparing for Thanksgiving every year, complaining about it, but then doing it anyway. “Maybe for me, I need to tell myself that I’m leaving,” he said. “So that I can stay.”

“I just need you guys to fight for me, man,” he continues. “I do think psychologically it’s an exhausting season. It’s a lot when you really, really care. It’s a lot when you’re trying to be, like, I don’t know what it is, but on that Sunday after a Saturday, I could sleep 12 hours straight. It’s exhausting. I don’t know why, it’s exhausting. So when you’re competing, when you’re really trying to get something to work, it’s draining more than anything I’ve ever done.”

“By the time you’ve done 20 of them in a year, it’s like, ‘I don’t want to do this again,’ and then you kind of have a summer. You have a summer where you start to hear people say, ‘We love this. Good job.’ And they remember two or three things you’ve done, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I love that. I can’t wait until it comes back.’”

“It makes you care about coming back. It makes you want to come back, and then there’s new talent coming in and then you find out who is hosting and it just makes you want to go back. It’s cyclical, the emotions.”

He also mentioned that he thinks everyone should see SNL live at least once and see how much work goes into it before they critique it, and I’ll say this on that point. I have a colleague who did just that. And he’s right. That colleague stopped doing weekly critiques because it didn’t feel right after seeing how much work goes into it. But I think that SNL needs us to review it, critique it, and write about what works and what doesn’t. It keeps the show relevant. It’s still the thing everyone talks about the Sunday after a show. In the short term, the highs and the disappointments are part of what keeps it going. The longer view is that actual fans of SNL, not the “Is this show still on?” people, really do appreciate it and understand the amount of work and effort that goes into producing these small miracles every week. I would miss it terribly if it were gone.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, because it’s often a topic of conversation on Reddit and social media, Michael Che also spoke about why he doesn’t show up anymore at the sign-off. “It started, like, I skipped one or two, just decompressing” at the end of a long night, and then “I found out that no one cared if you missed it that much, and then I just stopped.” He did say, however, that he may start returning to the goodnights because he didn’t think people actually knew he wasn’t there, and recently, even his mom noticed.

It’s a great episode if you’re a fan of SNL or Che. Listen to it here.