Michael Che And Colin Jost Swung By ‘Ellen’ To Do A Pre-Emmys ‘Weekday Update’

New Yorkers Michael Che and Colin Jost are currently stuck in Los Angeles, where they’ll be hosting the Emmys on Monday. (That’s Monday, not Sunday, as was the tradition.) While there, the Saturday Night Live guys had some time to kill, so they decided to hang out with Ellen DeGeneres and involve her in a chill West Coast version of their “Weekend Update,” customized for daytime weekday television.

Plopped into Friday’s episode of Ellen, Che, Jost, and Ellen herself sat down to anchor “Weekday Update,” an abbreviated, looser-than-usual approximation of the guests’ signature segment. Topics included: vaping, an anarchist ventriloquist, a man who’s eaten 30,000 Big Macs, and Pinterest. They also trend-spotted the fact that too many TV folks — like Steve Harvey, Stephen Colbert, and Alex Trebek — now have beards.

Che and Jost barely tried to keep it together; at one point Che flubbed a silly one-liner then, at DeGeneres’ bequest, went and tried it again. There was even some ball-busting, namely when DeGeneres threw in a diss of Jost’s high-profile romance with Scarlett Johansson.

It was a good way for Che and Jost to wet their whistle before Monday’s big show, which starts at 8pm on their home network, NBC. It was also announced last week that the two will be returning as SNL‘s co-head writers when the show returns on September 29.