On SNL, Dave Chappelle Makes a Plea for Empathy: “Whether They’re in the Palisades or Palestine”

At the start of Saturday Night Live‘s first monologue of 2025, host Dave Chappelle described how Lorne Michaels first approached him in October to do the show this season. He wanted Chappelle to weigh in on the state of affairs after the election. (Ah, those were salad days, when the impossible seemed possible!) Chappelle’s initial response? “Nah man, I’m cool.” But then he reasoned he had a bunch of Donald Trump jokes to offload, so what the hell “The moment I said yes,” he continued, “LA burst into flames.”

With so much of the city still desperate and reeling, and the winds getting ready to pick back up, surely it was too soon for him to tell jokes. And then Chappelle gave us that disobedient wink, the one that so often gets him in trouble.

A late bumper in the episode showed Chappelle wearing a somber expression, with the word HUMAN inked on his forearm. Indeed, he spent his nearly 17-minute monologue not on arch provocation or picking at grievance. At his worst, Chappelle has been unnecessarily stubborn and willfully blind. But last night, with the catastrophe of the fires as his inciting incident, he didn’t shove anyone outside of the tent he took his time setting up.

Instead, Chappelle took his time crafting an argument for radical empathy—for stars fleeing their million-dollar homes clutching an Erewhon bag of overnight clothes; for the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio; for the people of Palestine. What leaps that compassion demands us to take. What a swing, with one hand on the bat and the other pinching his cigarette.

The jabs were there, too. Jokes about how the news is calling the LA fires the most expensive natural disaster in US history: “People in LA have nice stuff. I could burn 40,000 acres in Mississippi for like, six or seven hundred dollars.” He talked about his loyalty to the Haitian folk living one town over from his home in Dayton. As Trump demonized those hard-working legal immigrants this fall, accusing them of dining out on suburban pets, Chappelle says he patronized a Springfield Haitian restaurant to show support: “I don’t know what that meat was, but whatever it was, it fell right off the bone.”

Chappelle touched on Diddy and his hurt feelings over realizing why he’d never been invited to a Freak Off party: “Oh my gosh, I’m ugly!” Moreover, “If you really study my face, clearly I have snitch energy.” Chappelle knew he was losing the crowd a little when he started riffing about the rap mogul’s baby oil consumption, as he paused to tap at his microphone. He pivoted back to the fires, musing that if Diddy hadn’t been caught, there’d be a mushroom cloud over his house with all that baby oil.

Then Chappelle hoisted himself off his stool, his voice turning lyrical. This Diddy nonsense, what does it matter when Monday looms—and half of us will spend the day with fingers in our ears, turned away from the screen while diehard MAGA warriors stand outside in the freezing DC cold? On the day that Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, the flags will be, or should be, at half-mast for Jimmy Carter. And here was the surprise hero of Chappelle’s monologue. He described being in the Middle East when Carter made a visit to Israel and decided, against Israel’s wishes, to visit the Palestinian territory. “I will never forget the images of a former American president walking with little to no security while thousands of Palestinians were cheering him on… I don’t know if that’s a good president, but that right there I am sure is a great man.” How’s that for a eulogy?

“So Donald Trump, I know you watch the show”—and here, Chappelle flashed his impish grin. “Man, remember whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you.” Those words seem trite on paper, but Chappelle delivered them so sincerely, and with real gravity. “Good luck. Please do better next time. Please all of us, do better next time.” I don’t know that Trump is capable of shame, but surely this is a better response to him than denial or cheap, ineffectual scorn.

“Yeah, it serves these celebrities right,” Chappelle said at the beginning of his monologue, imitating folks griping about the LA fires: “I hope their houses burn down.” He paused, getting ready to flip the script. “You see, that right there. That’s why I hate poor people. Because they can’t see past their own pain.”

“Do not forget your humanity, and please have empathy for displaced people whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine,” he said, completing his circle. Seeing past our own pain might be what gets us through the next four years, and allows for something realer and better in the future. At the end, Chappelle wished the audience good night. By the time he remembered the job at hand—to introduce musical guest GloRilla and promise a great show ahead—we’d already cut to commercials. Lorne Michaels was right. What we really needed was someone we trusted to make a little sense of the world, then tell us good night and good luck.