quote:
Michael Che
Daniel D'Addario
Fri, July 30, 2021, 1:33 PM·5 min read
In this article:

Michael Che
Actor

Michael Che’s eyebrow-raising attempt to score comedic points about Simone Bile’s difficult decision to withdraw from Olympic events aired on NBC might be more surprising if this hadn’t been his longstanding pattern. It points to his tendency to attempt to gin up controversy for a degree of attention even beyond the level a “SNL” star usually receives.

Che, the co-head writer of the show and co-anchor of its “Weekend Update” segment, added a series of since-deleted posts to his Instagram story on Thursday, beginning with ““man, i wanna make fun of simone biles.” He went on to share jokes other Instagram writers had made about Biles, including a crack about Larry Nassar, the former U.S. Gymnastics team doctor currently incarcerated as a sex offender. (Biles is among Nassar’s accusers.) Che later claimed to have been hacked and wiped his Instagram, but the posts fit what has become a career-long modus operandi of punching down.

quote:
Michael Che
Daniel D'Addario
Fri, July 30, 2021, 1:33 PM·5 min read
In this article:

Michael Che
Actor

Michael Che’s eyebrow-raising attempt to score comedic points about Simone Bile’s difficult decision to withdraw from Olympic events aired on NBC might be more surprising if this hadn’t been his longstanding pattern. It points to his tendency to attempt to gin up controversy for a degree of attention even beyond the level a “SNL” star usually receives.

Che, the co-head writer of the show and co-anchor of its “Weekend Update” segment, added a series of since-deleted posts to his Instagram story on Thursday, beginning with ““man, i wanna make fun of simone biles.” He went on to share jokes other Instagram writers had made about Biles, including a crack about Larry Nassar, the former U.S. Gymnastics team doctor currently incarcerated as a sex offender. (Biles is among Nassar’s accusers.) Che later claimed to have been hacked and wiped his Instagram, but the posts fit what has become a career-long modus operandi of punching down.

More from Variety

Michael Che Wipes Instagram Account After Backlash to Simone Biles Jokes

Emmy Predictions: Variety Sketch Series - Can 'Black Lady Sketch' Slay the 'SNL' Goliath?

Suni Lee Wins Gold Medal in All-Around Gymnastics for Team USA

Che’s jokes about Biles, as well as his implication that there’s an endless wellspring of things to mock about a young assault victim having a hard time on the world’s largest stage, comes from a place of strange and familiar cruelty that has often been reserved for his critics. (A good summary of Che’s history of using a style of aggressive posting that barely registers as comedy can be found here.)

The comic’s latest incident also rubs up uncomfortably against the current mood of “Saturday Night Live,” a show that lately has attempted a mood of somewhat affected cuddliness. “SNL” is capacious and has room for a lot of different tones in a single episode, but an especially pronounced one in recent seasons has been a sort of celebratory optimism, epitomized, for instance, by Maya Rudolph’s take on Kamala Harris as a cool, strong role model. The show has often seemed so hesitant to offend as to sidestep saying much at all.

Yahoo

The TMZ article has an image of what he posted on IG.

TMZ

If people will get offended why do they follow comedians? Their job is to tell jokes. As soon as anything happens, they are probably thinking of jokes to make about it.

While I am sure there will be people who will try to cancel him, it is pretty much free advertisement for him to people who enjoys comedy and realizes that part of their job is to cross the line to make jokes.