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Dave Chappelle Explained Why Black People Can’t Remove Their Masks
On the day of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ win, the comic delivered a ‘Saturday Night Live’ monologue that was cerebral, sharp, and timely
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Dave Chappelle’s 16-minute Saturday Night Live monologue was the complete Chappelle experience. It’s honestly an intimidating task to even try to absorb and put together cogent thoughts about something so layered and massive.
So, let’s start with the Klan joke.
Chappelle opened with jokes about his own career, including stories about his White neighbors and his royalty structure. (Somehow he’s not earning anything from HBO and Netflix now syndicating Chappelle’s Show?!)
Centering himself and his fame has been a feature in Chappelle’s stand-ups for the past decade — with mixed results. At the beginning of the monologue, he eased us into the belief that he was going to continue talking about himself. But without so much as a transition, he hit us with a joke about how White people should just wear Klan costumes to Walmart to make everyone feel safe. To call it a punch line doesn’t do the joke justice. It was an uppercut that he’d spent five minutes building up.
The joke was a commentary on the intersection between racism and anti-maskers, highlighting the irony that it’s the Klan mask that’s actually unnecessary as we can generally already tell who wears one of those. And it reminded us how we’re accustomed to the mask-less racism in America.
This joke, from the tee-up to the hit for the rafters, is the classic Chappelle masterpiece. It reminds us why he is on the Mount Rushmore of comedians.
Watching Dave Chappelle over the past few years has been a frustrating experience to say the least. He spent so much of his time antagonizing the LGBT community with lazy jokes as some sort of crusade against cancel culture. Not only has it harmed a community that already faces the worst we can do to others, he’s also often sullying his craft with jokes that just aren’t funny.
