Dave Chappelle’s third opening monologue on Saturday Night Live opened with a disclaimer denouncing antisemitism. “And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.”
Chappelle began his 15-minute stand-up on Kanye West’s disastrous few weeks, during which anti-semitic comments caused him to lose, among other things, more than a billion dollars of his net worth in a single day.
“I gotta tell you guys, I’ve probably been doing this for 35 years now and early in my career, I learned that there are two words in the English language that you should never say together in sequence and those words are ‘The’ and ‘Jews.’”
“Kanye’s gotten into some scrapes before and normally when he’s in trouble, I pull up immediately,” Chappelle continued. “This time I was like, you know what? Let me see what’s gonna happen first.”
The audience laughed as Chappelle traced the events back to the strange tweet that appeared to start it all. “It was like, “I’m feeling a little sleepy, I’m gonna get some rest, but when I wake up, I’m gonna go DEFCON 3 on the Jews!’ And then he just went to bed,” Chappelle said, eventually segueing into another antisemitic controversy: “Kanye got in so much trouble, Kyrie got in trouble.”
The Brooklyn Nets star was recently suspended for at least five games after sharing a link to the antisemitic documentary film Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America. Chappelle didn’t condone it, but argued that the backlash went too far. “He was slow to apologize and the demands to get back in their good graces got longer and longer, and this is where I draw the line: I know the Jewish people have done some terrible things all over the world, but you can’t blame that on Black Americans. You just can’t.”
He went on to discuss the midterm elections and the fate of the Trump era. This portion was more in line with his last two SNL monologues, both of which came after the last two presidential elections, Trump’s in 2016, and Biden’s in 2020. Chappelle explained how living in Ohio, among the “poor whites” who make up Trump’s base, give him insight into the future of American politics. “He’s very loved. And the reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him.”
