Did you catch “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend? Our very own CNH was featured in a Weekend Update sketch for millions of viewers to see. Co-anchor Michael Che joked about the decreasing rate of Black men attending Historically Black Colleges, saying that it is because they “are lacking one key resource: white girls.”
A photo of CNH was displayed on screen beside him during this joke about HBCUs. While Christopher Newport University is not an HBCU, it is a predominately white institution. University statistics on the CNU website show that 72.09% of students in the Fall of 2023 were white.
The choice to use a picture of CNH could have served as commentary on the lack of white women at HBCUs, as there are obviously plenty of white women at CNU.
It is unclear whether the SNL writers and producers knew that CNU was a predominately white institution and chose to use a picture of the university as a joke. It is most likely that they picked a random picture of a random school and it just so happened to be ours.
The rest of Weekend Update was a hit on social media this past week, particularly a segment of Ego Nwodim prompting the audience to curse (which is not allowed on air). Nwodim asked the crowd, “These men ain’t what?” to which those sitting before her responded in unison, saying, “Shit.”
A shocked Nwodim replied, “We finna get fined for that,” as Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Che broke out in laughter behind her. “Lorne will be mad at y’all,” she continued, referring to Lorne Michaels, who created SNL. It has yet to be confirmed if the FCC will fine SNL, as the banned word made it onto streaming but was caught by the five-second delay on NBC, per Deadline.
