Dave Chappelle kicked off the first Saturday Night Live of the year with a winding 17-minute monologue that touched on the Los Angeles wildfires, Diddy’s arrest and the upcoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
The veteran comic linked together stories, starting and ending with a call for empathy for the people who lost their homes in the Los Angeles fires, but not before he got a few shots in at the city’s expense.
Noting the confluence of extremely dry weather and incredibly strong winds, Chappelle asked the audience to consider the fact that this might be divine judgement.
“If you’re a rational thinking person, you have to consider the possibility that God hates these people,” Chappelle cracked, before comparing the movie industry’s center to Sodom.
Turning to Trump, the longtime resident of Ohio discussed the president-elect’s campaign rhetoric around Haitian immigrants in Springfield. He said the perception that legal immigrants to the city were “eating cats” is inaccurate and gave his read on the situation.
“They saved a lot of companies. They did jobs that the whites weren’t doing,” Chappelle said. “[White people] were busy doing other things: heroin, sleeping on the streets, you know what it is.”
Chappelle said he drove over to Springfield and regularly ate at Haitian restaurants to show his support for the community.
“To be honest with you, I don’t know what that meat was,” he joked. “But whatever it was, it fell right off the bone.”
Chappelle turned away from Trump briefly to touch on the case against music mogul Diddy. He said he never attended any of the celeb’s infamous “freak off” parties, but only because he was never invited.
“I’m ugly,” he offered, by way of explanation. That’s a tough way to find that out…everyone in Hollywood had an orgy behind your back.”
Chappelle drew a line between Diddy and the wildfires, saying he was thankful that Diddy’s home was raided well before the conflagration.
“Thank god they caught him before those fires,” he said. “There would have been a goddamn mushroom cloud over his house, 1000 bottles of baby oil.”
Turning to Trump once more, Chappelle urged the president-elect to follow the example of the late President Jimmy Carter.
“The presidency is no place for petty people,” he said. “Whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you.”
Watch Chappelle’s monologue below:
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