Reading List: A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost

For a recount of the easiest life someone's ever had- not bad.

This is not a book I would have picked ordinarily, but I’m glad I read it. Technically, it was consumed as an audiobook to pass the time on a road trip to Chicago. But it did indeed pass the time.

I knew who Colin Jost was before I read it, but, in full frankness, he was not really someone I cared enough about to seek out his autobiography. I knew he did a news segment on SNL with Michael Che and is married to Scarlett Johansson. That’s it. How it came to be in my figurative hands was because a) it was recommended to me by the guy I started seeing, and b) the audiobook was free and available on Libby.

So this book was taken in with zero expectations, which, I feel, is the correct way to come into reading this. Jost is funny-I think I did even laugh out loud at one point. But it’s important to remember that he’s a white man whose mother was a doctor. I feel like most autobiographies recount hard work, perseverance, overcoming the odds, etc. Some sort of commendable display of human spirit that deepens your appreciation for the person’s journey to success. There is none of that here. Jost grew up comfortable, went to good schools, and found success young.

Jost hasn’t really known real struggle, only unlikely and absurd struggles like living with elderly Russian people in Moscow who never spoke to him. Like, in seriousness, that’s the one and only event I read about in the book where he experiences something genuinely difficult and character-building.

The most enduring part of the book was Jost’s recount of 9/11, though. Albeit it was not his struggle (I cannot emphasize enough how little this man has struggled), but rather his mother’s. Still, it’s laudable for good writing to convey another’s story to the point of being moving. In the audiobook, there is a genuine reverence to the way Jost reads that part. It was an enduring sincerity that made the audiobook very enjoyable.

4.5/5