When Dave Chappelle hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, four days after the presidential election, he ended his monologue with a thought about President-elect Donald J. Trump. “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck,” Chappelle said at the time. “And I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too.”
Chappelle came back to host “S.N.L.” the weekend after the 2020 presidential election and midterm vote of 2022, but although he was invited to the same slot in 2024, he declined. In a long and lively monologue on this weekend’s broadcast, he explained why.
Recounting a conversation with Lorne Michaels, the “S.N.L.” creator and executive producer, Chappelle said, “I was like, ‘Nah, man, I’m cool,’” adding: “Things are going good. I finished my Netflix deal. I got all this money and stuff.” But Michaels persisted, so to get off the phone, Chappelle said, he offered a compromise: “I said, ‘Just save the date closest to Jan. 6.’”
Dressed in a suit and tie and taking occasional drags from a cigarette, Chappelle commented on a wide range of news events, including the Los Angeles wildfires. “It is way too soon to do jokes about a catastrophe like that,” he said, a mischievous grin crossing his face.
He talked about how the fires had affected his friends and colleagues like the actors Cary Elwes and Dennis Quaid and the rapper Madlib. He said that reading callous online comments from people wishing that celebrities’ houses would burn down upset him. “You see that?” Chappelle said. “That right there? That’s why I hate poor people. Because they can’t see past their own pain.”
He called the wildfires “the most expensive natural disaster that’s ever happened in United States history,” probably because “people in L.A. have nice stuff.”
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