CHAPPELLE GETS SHARP ON ‘SNL’
No apologies were forthcoming — just jabs at others, including Ye
Dave Chappelle returned for his third stint as host of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which gave the controversial comedian a starring role in an episode dominated by the midterm elections and the fallout from Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks.
As Chappelle walked onto the stage for his opening monologue, he pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and said he was going to “read a brief statement” that he had prepared.
“I denounce antisemitism in all its forms, and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community,” he began.
“And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time,” he said, to laughs from the live audience.
The choice of Chappelle, who hosted SNL after the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020, to anchor the postmidterms episode raised eyebrows because of his past jokes about transgender people. The release last year of his Netflix special, The Closer, sparked a walkout by some employees of the streaming service who viewed his jokes as transphobic.
Last week, Page Six reported that some SNL writers were planning a boycott in protest of Chappelle. In a statement to CNN, a representative for Chappelle said that “we’ve seen nothing to support media reports of a writer’s boycott”. NBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Sunday.
Chappelle has repeatedly joked about trans people over the years in ways some have deemed offensive and dangerous. He has blamed the media for framing the backlash “as though it’s me versus [the LGBTQ] community, that’s not what it is”.
ALLUDING TO CONTROVERSY
In Saturday’s episode, Chappelle did not directly address the controversy over his jokes about trans people, but touched on several other hot topics. He dedicated almost half of his opening monologue to the backlash over antisemitic statements and material shared by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and by Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving.
In recent weeks, Ye lost lucrative endorsement deals and attracted condemnation from all corners of the entertainment industry for his remarks about Jews, including a threat on Twitter to go “death con 3” on them. And the Nets suspended Irving after he tweeted a link to a documentary the Anti-Defamation League described as including “extensive antisemitism.”
In his jokes, Chappelle appeared to pull from the same themes that landed Ye and Irving in hot water, alluding at one point to the unfounded antisemitic trope that Jewish people wield dispro
portionate power in some industries.
He also said he understood how someone with “some kind of issue” — Ye has bipolar disorder — could “adopt the delusion” that Jewish people “run show business,” another antisemitic trope.
The other half of Chappelle’s monologue — and much of the rest of the episode — was dedicated to politics and the midterm elections, whose outcome came into sharper focus after the episode began as a Democratic win in Nevada allowed the party to retain its Senate majority. Control over the House is still being decided.
Many of the sketches walked the line between comedy and discomfort that Chappelle has honed since Chappelle’s Show, poking fun at White people and their perceived cluelessness about Black culture and history.
But Chappelle’s jokes about the backlash to Ye’s and Irving’s antisemitism appeared to have attracted the most attention, and he was trending on Twitter early Sunday as a split audience debated his performance.
At the heart of the heated online debates was whether Chappelle was endorsing antisemitism along with Ye and Irving’s recent statements — or if he was lampooning it.
The only certainty is that the monologue was divisive, but, as musician Felix Kay opined: “Dave Chappelle is a comedian. You either like his jokes or you. don’t. He doesn’t care.”
The comedian appeared to acknowledge the divide over his humour toward the end of his monologue, saying: “It shouldn’t be this scary to talk — about anything.”