During a recent show in San Francisco, comedian Dave Chappelle, who hosted Saturday Night Live for the fourth time last month, revealed that the creative forces behind the sketch comedy series had forbidden him from speaking about two topics: Gaza, and transgender people.
According to a review in SFGate by culture editor Dan Gentile, Chappelle didn’t elaborate after sharing this piece of information beyond closing his set with, “Give the Jews a break, free Palestine.”
SNL’s Lorne Michaels was likely looking to avoid the controversy that comes with Chappelle speaking about sensitive topics—particularly after the announcement of Chappelle’s returning hosting gig itself sparked backlash.
Chappelle has previously described Israel’s actions in Gaza as constituting a genocide, and managed to devote time during his SNL monologue to discussing former President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Palestine. “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,” said Chappelle. “When I saw that picture, it brought tears to my eyes.”
Whether Michaels felt this mention of Palestine was a violation of his edict, Chappelle didn’t say during his show at San Francisco’s Masonic on Thursday night.
Unfortunately, Chappelle has also spent several years punching down on transgender people in his sets, including defending J.K. Rowling in his 2021 Netflix special, The Closer.
In the course of defending Rowling, Chappelle described himself as “Team TERF”—an acronym that refers to Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, but that has come to be applied more broadly to anyone espousing transphobic views—and argued that gender was a fact. “Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth,” he told his audience. “This is a fact.” One non-binary SNL writer boycotted Chappelle’s hosting week in 2022 following his statements.
During his most recent SNL monologue, Chappelle told the audience in Studio 8H that he had declined to host the first SNL show after the election, hoping to avoid controversy; he then joked that after he eventually said yes, “LA burst into flames.” Chappelle had previously hosted post-election episodes of SNL in 2016, 2020, and 2022 (following the midterm elections), making 2024 the first time in almost a decade that he was absent from the show’s first episode following a presidential election.
