Over the last few years, Dave Chappelle has run into no small amount of controversy, but during his third stint hosting SNL, he more or less played nice. In fact, during what must be the longest opening monologue in the show’s history, he opened by dragging someone who said something much worse than he ever did: Kanye West.
Chappelle kicked off his 15-minute set by reading a prepared statement: “I renounce anti-Semitism in all its forms.” He added, “And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.”
Much of Chappelle’s monologue was about punching up, albeit at people who aren’t doing so hot right now. West sure isn’t. Throughout his set, Chappelle walked right up to the line of saying something offensive, if only to show there’s lines he won’t cross.
“I’ve been doing this 35 years. Two words in English language words you should never say: ‘The’ and ‘Jews.’ No one does good after they say that,” he cracked.
“I don’t think Kanye is crazy, he’s possibly not well,” he said. “I’ve been to Hollywood, this is just what I saw. It’s a lot of Jews. Like a lot. There’s a lot of Black people in Ferguson, Missouri, doesn’t mean they run the place. You might go out in Hollywood and you might start connecting some kind of lines and you might adopt the delusion that Jews run showbusiness. It’s not a crazy thing to think but it’s a crazy thing to say out loud.”
Chappelle later moved onto Herschel Walker, whose Trump-backed Senate race so underperformed that there’s a runoff election for him and incumbent Raphael Warnock. “I don’t want to speak badly of him because he’s Black, but I have to admit he’s observably stupid,” he cracked. “He’s the guy who looks like he thinks before he makes a move on Tic-Tac-Toe.”
He soon tackled Trump, dissecting — as a current Ohio resident — why people love him: because, he argued, he’s an “honest liar.” That is, he confirmed long-held suspicions about how a crooked system works…but only because he continues to take part in it.
But perhaps his best line was about Trump’s better half. Of Melania, he said she “looks like the kind of chick that James Bond would smash but not trust.”
You can watch the full, very long monologue in the video above.