Maybe Dave Chappelle Should Host Every Election Week Episode Of ‘SNL’?

You may have thought Lorne Michaels was courting controversy or spitting on superstitions or both by inviting Dave Chappelle back to host Saturday Night Live four years after Chappelle helmed the 2016 Election week and suggested we all just give Trump a chance? Instead, we were treated to an extra loosey-goosey episode. All of New York City (and many cities across America and even the world) partied all afternoon into the evening, so why should the mood inside 30 Rock be any different? Michael Che sipped from his drink during Weekend Update and took off his tie (it’s a clip-on!), cast members were breaking fourth walls and cracking up. It has been a long four years, and that’s just this week, so why the heck not.
I suppose it’s fitting, too, that after waiting a few extra days for some states to finish counting presidential ballots, we’d all have to wait a few minutes more (WNBC in NYC cut to SNL at 11:53) to start the show. College football, baby! Turns out even Chappelle can get bumped.
NOTE: SNL actually was “live to tape” this week, and you can notice that by looking at the clock inside the studio right before Chappelle walks onstage. It read 11:38.

What’s The Deal With The SNL Cold Open for 11/07/20?

Obviously we’d get an election-themed cold open. Question was, how timely would the writers and cast try to make it, considering Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had just delivered their victory speeches as President-elect and Vice President-elect during the 8 p.m. hour Saturday.
Turns out, very timely! Props to the SNL props department. Scratch that. Make it the wardrobe department for having a white suit fitted and ready for Maya Rudolph to match up with Harris’s look this Saturday evening. Jim Carrey as Biden, meanwhile, not only continued with his finger-gun opening, but also leaned into his archive of previous moves with a vintage Ace Ventura “loser” joke aimed at Trump. We’re not really going to expect Carrey to stay with SNL for four more years, are we? A question for another day.
Better question: What did Steve Kornacki do to deserve the SNL snub?! What happened to that classic Comcast synergy first prophesied by Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock? Instead of letting Alex Moffat take a crack at Kornacki, the show cast him as CNN’s John King, alongside Beck Bennett as Wolf Blitzer. There was a tantric Sting joke somewhere in there that plenty of comedians and comedy critics alike already had lobbed over Twitter earlier in the week. Plenty of Tweets accurately predicted SNL would wheel out the piano, too, although few correctly guessed Baldwin’s Trump would perform a slowed-down version of the chorus to “Macho Man” by The Village People.

So…hallelujah?

How Did The SNL Guest Host Dave Chappelle Do?

Would Chappelle ask Americans to give Biden a chance, as he had four years ago for Trump? Not a chance.
Would the rest of the show just be Chappelle’s monologue? Possibly. It certainly seemed it could go that way for a moment, as the heralded stand-up kept talking for more than 16 minutes. I believe that’s a record. But could you imagine Lorne trying to cut Chappelle off? After all, he did get invited back specifically to be the comedian to speak to America in this pivotal moment, just as he had four years ago in the wake of Trump’s victory. Only Chappelle could get away with smoking a cigarette inside a NYC building, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with no apparent restrictions whatseover.
He managed to plug Chappelle’s Show debuting this month on both Netflix and HBO Max, then turning himself into the victim for not profiting off of those streaming platforms, as mocked by the ghost of his great-great grandfather. He reminded Americans that the political transition doesn’t make Americans necessarily feel safer thanks to COVID-19, or the regular mass shootings that preceded the pandemic. So he found gratitude in the coronavirus for coming along “to lock up these murderous whites,” and found reason to be jealous of Trump for his “hilarious racist” joke calling it the “Kung Flu.”
Unlike many stand-ups in lockdown, Chappelle managed to perform throughout the summer by figuring out the logistics of turning his neighbor’s property into an outdoor masked venue. He also figured out how to get the last laugh and then some against other neighbors complaining about the noise, with references that hinted at the Electoral College and explicitly mentioned the KKK, Ronald Reagan, heroin and the niche dating app FarmersOnly.
Not everything hit. A bit about Trump’s infamous improvised press conference in which he speculated on injecting sunlight and bleach into our bodies targeted Dr. Deborah Birx as a reason why women still earn less than men, and later Chappelle compared Trump catching COVID to Freddie Mercury getting AIDS. Before the comedian fell into either trap he set for himself, he cut off any criticism (as is his wont), asking first, “Did I trigger you?” then adding: “I’m sorry, Lorne. I thought we were having a comedy show here.”
Chappelle did offer some olive branches, too, though. He suggested finding humility in victory, looking for ways to forgive each other, and a form of reparations he dubbed “The Kindness Conspiracy,” in which White Americans commit random acts of kindness toward Black Americans just because they’re Black.

In the first of two more unusual transitions for SNL, Chappelle didn’t say “we have a great show, so stick around,” but rather, “thank you and good night” before drop/tossing the mic.
We’ll get to his other performances later in the recap.

How Relevant Was The Musical Guest?

You’re not going to hear any complaints here about having the Foo Fighters on. Well, OK, perhaps just one quibble. I wish Dave Grohl had found a way to fly young Nandi Bushell, the British and Zulu drumming prodigy, across the pond. Otherwise, you know Grohl is going to give it his all, and the band debuted a new single, “Shame Shame,” from their forthcoming album, “Medicine At Midnight.”

Later, Grohl and company served up a rousing rendition of “Times Like These.” It is a new day rising. It is time to learn to live again, to learn to love again.

Which Sketch Will We Be Sharing?

The first sketch after the ads that followed Chappelle’s monologue found Chappelle center stage again. Huh? How many times in modern memory have we seen the host introduce a sketch? This wouldn’t be a normal sketch, though…
For one thing, Alec Baldwin is there delivering the opening lines as a corporate executive laying off an employee. The employee? Aunt Jemima! As soon as Maya Rudolph introduced herself, she and almost everyone else onstage, in the studio, and at home began to lose it. Then came Kenan Thompson as Uncle Ben, also now out of a job. They tried in vain to drag “the Allstate guy” down with them, but Chappelle and his deep voice not only defended his continued employment, but also broke into laughs himself, broke the fourht wall by calling Count Chocula by his real name, aka Pete Davidson, thereby making Davidson giggle his fake fangs out of his luscious lips. Just plain silliness. Good times.

Who Stopped By Weekend Update?

Kate McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani didn’t get nearly enough airtime last time, wedged into a busy cold open, but this week she had Update all to herself, thanks to today’s real-life press conference in front of the…checks notes…Four Seasons Total Landscaping storefront in Philadelphia. After first getting in a crack at Colin Jost and Michael Che: “If it ain’t de Blasio and Dinkins!” the fellow former mayor of New York, as portrayed by McKinnon, then really went wild, eventually getting out of her chair and playing with Jost’s chair and hair and whatnot.
As much as we may focus on her facial expressions, what makes McKinnon’s Giuliani soar for me are her hands, with her fingers splayed out (and one finger on each hand hiding) to give her Giuliani a more reptilian presence. Checks out.

What Sketch Filled The “10-to-1” Slot?

The show aired late, and didn’t even get around to giving a weirder-than-weird sketch the final slot after the second musical performance to round out the episode.
If anything had that 12:50-12:55 a.m. vibe, it would’ve been the Super Mario 35th Anniversary sketch, and not just because it made Kyle Mooney the butt of the joke by graphically detailing how much pelvic pain his character endured at times that coincided with great moments in Super Mario history.

Who Was The Episode’s MVP?

Ego Nwodim. Nwodim anchored back-to-back sketches as completely different types of local TV news anchors, and had to put up with all sorts of white man foolishness in both the Super Mario short, as well as the “Take Me Back” short in which Beck Bennett’s character (we’ve seen this guy in a previous season, right?) offhandedly makes one bizarre confession after another. And yet. White people going crazy and a black woman saves us from ourselves. Symbolic.

Everybody gets next week off. We deserve it.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch SNL Season 46 Episode 6 on YouTube