Dave Chappelle admitted that saying he’d “give Trump a chance” during his 2016 Saturday Night Live monologue may not have “aged well.”
The comedian was asked what he thinks of the Emmy-nominated monologue now, eight years later, in a new “Actors on Actors” interview for Variety.
“I remember it fondly,” he said of the monologue, before he was asked specifically about the comment offering Trump some grace. “Oh, I remember that part,” he said. “That’s what it felt like in that moment. Now, if it ages well or not, I don’t get mad if I look at a picture because it’s not today. That’s what it was at that time. You might look at an old set and cringe, but you could just cringe because of how you were at that time.”
Chappelle hosted the first SNL episode after the 2016 election, as has become a tradition of sorts, when he made the comments.
“America’s done it. We’ve actually elected an internet troll as our president,” he said then. Toward the end, he added, “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.”
Chappelle walked back his comments months later during his appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “It’s not like I wanted to give him a chance that night,” he told Colbert. Trump’s a “a polarizing dude,” he added. “He’s like a bad DJ at a good party.”
“A lot of white Americans finally got a chance to see what an Election Night looks like for many black Americans every cycle,” he also said. That episode featured his Election Night sketch with special guest Chris Rock, in which the comedians laughed as their characters’ white counterparts called Trump’s win “the most shameful thing America has ever done.”
Even though he may “cringe,” watching the episode’s monologue over again (which he hasn’t “in awhile,” he told the site), it wasn’t the “hardest” one he delivered.
“The hardest one was maybe the one when Biden got elected, because we didn’t know he was going to be president until Saturday morning. So I had a set for if Trump won, and I had a set for if Biden won,” Chappelle said, noting the “pressure on live television.”
He added, “You never do as good as you think you’re going to do, but it’s never that bad.”
