Modern Family producer Danny Zuker likes comedian Dave Chappelle. Zuker, however, does not like his recent antisemitic “Saturday Night Live” monologue, and says that making these feelings known is not cancel culture.
“I liked that monologue, most of it,” Zuker tells New Abnormal podcast co-host Andy Levy on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. “But the thing is—[and] I know how he feels, by the way—I don’t think it’s right. I don’t wanna cancel Dave Chappelle, but if I can’t criticize a false premise in his monologue... I’m allowed to do that. I feel like there’s so much more risk in criticizing him than him doing his act.”
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If anything, adds Zuker, people on the right who push back against cancel culture are accusing the wrong people of being overly sensitive.
“I think that for as long as people have been doing stand-up comedy, there have been people who have protested and wanted them off the air. It’s happened forever. And I do think the only difference right now is that people are whining about it so much. Comedians are whining about it a lot,” he says.
“The one thing you could say about Jews, as a group and it doesn’t go the whole way, is that like, we kind of have a sense of humor. People can make jokes about us. We’re, like, famously doing that. I would suggest that people who are like Chappelle, and I feel this way about Bill Maher too, they’re the thin-skinned ones,” he says.
Zuker and Andy also talk about the time that he harassed Donald Trump on Twitter (and has no regrets about it) as well as the reason he wants to “rage” at Democrats.
“[President Joe Biden] is not going to get any credit for crossing an additional ‘t’ or dotting an additional ‘i’. We have it, let’s move forward,” he says.
Plus! For Modern Family fans, Zuker shares how he ended up getting the gig with the show, including how he almost turned it down out of spite, why the writers made Luke’s character “weirdly libertarian,” and a touching story about how the show made a conservative dad less of a bigot.
