Saturday Night Live‘s Michael Che took a swipe at Joy Reid’s firing by joking he might be the next one out the door.
Reid, the 56-year-old political pundit and host of The ReidOut, got axed last week during MSNBC’s programming shakeup, according to NPR.
During the latest “Weekend Update” segment, Che took a playful jab at his own network, NBC, by bringing up MSNBC’s recent decision to fire Reid.
“This week, MSNBC fired its only nonwhite primetime host, and Lester Holt announced he is stepping down as the anchor of NBC Nightly News,” Che quipped at the 3:48 mark in the video above.
“Well, NBC, only one more to go, baby,” he added, as his own photo popped up as an over-the-shoulder graphic.
Reid’s final show aired Monday, with rotating hosts temporarily filling her timeslot. The move triggered outrage, with Rachel Maddow calling the decision “indefensible” and highlighting that MSNBC’s nonwhite primetime hosts, Reid and Katie Phang, have both lost their shows.
“I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door,” said Maddow, 51, per NPR. “It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two nonwhite hosts in primetime, both of our nonwhite hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend.”
Reid thanked her fans and friends in a fresh message on her Bluesky account last Monday, writing, “I just want to say thank you to everyone who has reached out with kindness and encouragement, both personally and in these social media streets. So very proud of The Reidout @joy.msnbc.com team, who are truly family, and all of our supporters & friends.”
Last night’s SNL episode also tackled other hot topics, including Andrew Cuomo’s newly-announced mayoral run and the weird AI-generated video posted by President Donald Trump showing a Trump resort on the Gaza Strip, joking that it looked like an “ISIS Recruitment Ad.”
Co-anchor Colin Jost mentioned the rocky meeting between Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday that was supposed to explore ways to end the war with Russia.
The meeting got a mention in SNL‘s cold open featuring Mike Myers, James Austin Johnson, Bowen Yang, Marcello Hernández, and Mikey Day playing Elon Musk, Trump, Vance, Marco Rubio, and Zelenskyy, respectively.
