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The thing about baby names is everyone has an opinion on them. Some people keep their baby’s name under lock and key until after they’re born—and it’s not hard to understand why when you’re worried people will hate it. Hearing Colin Jost tell the hilarious story about his own mom’s reaction to his son’s name will make you laugh, though.
During an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Jost tells Meyers all about his mom’s feelings about the name he and Scarlett Johansson chose for their new baby boy: Cosmo.
And from the sound of it, it seems like she went through the five stages of grief over the name: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, eventually (because she had no other choice), acceptance.
She went really heavy on the denial and bargaining, it seems.
“My mom, I would say, was slightly thrown by it and didn’t quite understand it,” he says in the clip from the show. “I don’t know if she thought it was kind of like a hippie thing.”
Colin Jost Reveals Why He Named His Baby Cosmo
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Unique baby names are the way a lot of parents go these days, and it’s understandable that friends and relatives (especially of different generations) don’t “get” baby name choices. But you’ve got to admire Mrs. Jost’s commitment to convincing her son to change the name of her grandson—though her alternatives aren’t exactly…better.
“She would call us after three or four days, she’d be like, ‘Cosmo,’” Colin recalled. “And she’d be like, ‘And now, is it final? Like, did you submit the birth certificate?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we did that at the hospital.’ She was like ‘OK, interesting. Because I was reading that there’s also a name Cosimo with an ‘I,’ so that could also be an option. Maybe Cosimo, that’s his real name, but then you can call him still Cosmo.’”
Jost explained that his mom began talking about the name “Cosmo” with “various members of the Italian community” in Staten Island where she lives, and felt mollified about The Name Situation after realizing there are actual people outside of Seinfeld‘s Cosmo Kramer named, well, Cosmo.
“And so then she would call, and she would say, ‘I met someone—they said their uncle’s name is Cosmo. So it is OK.’” She also tried to get them to add an ‘s’ at the end of it in order for it to mirror the name of Cosmos, a patron saint.
Jost and Johansson weren’t having it, though they expressed their gratitude toward her determination.
“We don’t need more worse variants on Cosmo,” Jost explained to Meyers. “But thanks, Mom.”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to explain your baby name choices/spellings/pronunciations to confused relatives—yep, yep, I see 99% of your hands raised. LOL. See? Celebrities—they’re just like us.
