Dave Chappelle mixes in a little bit of ‘SNL’ with a standup gig

I told you all that Dave Chappelle shouldn’t host SNL again. But Lorne Michaels just didn’t want to listen. (Or, more likely, he’s not a Popculturology subscriber. At least not with his official NBC email address.)

Chappelle returned to SNL this past weekend, hosting the show for the fourth time. Unlike the previous three times he hosted, this gig didn’t come immediately after a major election in the United States. No, this time, it was synced up with Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration.

I didn’t watch this latest Chappelle episode live on Saturday night. We were in New York City for a wedding, which meant I was as physically close to an episode of SNL as ever before — but too close based on the realities of time to get this edition of Deep SNL Thoughts out before late Sunday night.

When I included Chappelle in my list of people who shouldn’t host SNL again in December 2023, I wrote the following:

Even if you could somehow get past the social issues, Chappelle’s SNL hosting gigs are lazy. They rely on retreading characters from Chappelle’s Show (a show that went off the air in 2006). Chappelle often doesn’t appear in sketches.

I couldn’t have predicted what would happen this episode any better.

After a 17-minute monologue ate up a huge chunk of time — if NBC wants a Chappelle standup special, just give him one — the comedian smoked his way through bits of the rest of the episode, skipping the live post-Weekend Update sketch before appearing in a pretaped sketch as one of his characters from Chappelle’s Show.

An episode would honestly be better with no host at all. At least there’d be more time for actual sketches. (This Deep SNL Thoughts is going to feel short since there were only five sketches, not counting the monologue and Update.)

COLD OPEN

MSNBC Special Coverage

SNL checked off a bunch of recent political bits with the cold open: Trump’s interest in Canada and Greenland, the TikTok ban, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent shenanigans. A pretty classic cold open that neither challenged or offended.

• Zero Zucks: While this episode was the first of Season 50 to feature not a single SNL veteran, this cold open would’ve been the perfect opportunity for Andy Samberg to resurrect his Zuckerberg portrayal.
• I don’t think Jimmy Carter was really your dad … For some reason, we got Bowen Yang as George Santos again in this sketch. Unless I missed it, Santos was not in the news in any way this week.

THE MONOLOGUE

If you’re a comedian and you host SNL, there’s little chance you’re going to do a monologue that isn’t standup. Chappelle took that to the extreme this episode, performing a set that stretched on for roughly seventeen minutes for his monologue.

Seventeen. Minutes.

As I asked before, why not just give Chappelle a standup special, NBC? If you like Chappelle’s brand of punching-down humor, you probably enjoyed this monologue. If that’s not your kind of humor, you were probably hoping it would end with enough time for SNL to squeeze in a sketch or two.