Michael Che And Colin Jost Cracked The Best ‘Atlanta’ Joke During Their Emmys Monologue

Michael Che and Colin Jost came out to deliver their 2018 Emmys opening monologue, rescuing the show after a bit of a cringe-worthy opening segment called “We Solved it,” joking about the continued lack of diversity in Hollywood — despite this year having the most diverse list of nominees ever.

In what was certainly a departure from Stephen Colbert’s 2017 opening monologue in which Sean Spicer was even trotted out as a joke, Che and Jost largely skated on the edge of getting political, making veiled references to Trump but never actually uttering his name. In one of the fire jokes early on in the monologue, Colin Jost remarked that the very first Emmy awards took place in the year 1949, “when gas was 17 cents, a new home was $7,000, and we all agreed that Nazis were bad.”

But other than that, and some obligatory shots at Roseanne Barr, the monologue was relatively tame. There were plenty of Netflix jokes, as the streaming service is once again dominating nominations again this year, which Jost cracked that “if you’re a network executive, that’s the scariest thing you can hear, besides ‘Sir, Ronan Farrow is on line one.'”

No doubt the joke that got the biggest laugh circled back around to Hollywood’s attempts as diversifying the television landscape. “There’s even more diversity coming to TV, there’s a Lantino Magnum P.I., there’s gonna be a black Samantha in a reboot of Bewitched,” Jost noted. “But it’s gonna get balanced out by an all-white reboot of Atlanta, called 15 Miles Outside of Atlanta.”

“It focuses on white women who call the cops on the cast of Atlanta,” he added, to resounding laughter from the audience. Twitter likewise agreed.

https://twitter.com/pbrad11990/status/1041843915689787393

https://twitter.com/Emily_Marie_/status/1041842730123579392

It’s worth noting that as of 45 minutes into the telecast, no people of color had won any awards, and as Che deadpanned, “nobody thanked Jesus yet.”