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The “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” host gave one curious fan a history lesson on his wife’s Scandinavian roots.
Key Points
- Pop Culture Jeopardy! host Colin Jost explains how to correctly pronounce his wife Scarlett Johansson’s last name.
- “I certainly say Jo-hansson,” he revealed during a Q&A session with audience members.
- Considering her Scandinavian roots in both Denmark and Sweden, Jost added, “it was Yo-hansson probably originally.”
He’ll take “Hollywood Names” for $500.
Pop Culture Jeopardy host Colin Jost explained how to correctly pronounce his wife Scarlett Johansson’s last name during a recent Q&A with audience members of the Netflix game show.
“I certainly say Jo-hansson,” he replied. “I mean, I don’t say it really ever… [like] ‘Yo, Johansson, why is the fridge empty?’”
The New York-born Black Widow actress holds dual American and Danish citizenship and has deep Scandinavian roots: Johansson’s father is originally from Copenhagen and her paternal great-grandfather was Swedish.
Considering her heritage, “it was Yo-hansson probably originally,” explained her Saturday Night Live comedian husband. “And I was probably ‘Yost’ in Germany. But now, that’s all long forgotten. So we changed together. All ancestors just coordinated and said, ‘Let’s get them together.’”
In 2017, the year Johansson began dating Jost after meeting on SNL, she appeared on the PBS show Finding Your Roots and learned more about her maternal great-grandfather, who emigrated from Poland to America in 1910 and sold bananas on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“I can only imagine he was coming from a place where he could not continue to survive,” she told host Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “I think he must have come from some broken place, which would have caused him to go on a journey like this by himself.”
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Johansson was heartbroken to learn several members of her Jewish great-grandfather’s family who stayed behind in Poland ultimately died in the Warsaw Ghetto organized by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Jost’s Oscar-nominated wife has come up before during his Pop Culture Jeopardy Q&A sessions. When asked who was the most famous person in his phone’s contacts, the host admitted, “probably the one labeled wife.”
After Johansson, Jost revealed he also has the digits for Barack Obama and Jack Harlow, the latter of whom he has accidentally called instead of his friend named Jack Howard on several occasions.
“I’m like, ‘oh god, he just got a weird missed call from me at 11 p.m.,’” joked Jost. “And I’m sure he’s like, ‘Dude, this SNL guy’s gotta let it go.’”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
