Four years ago, Kate McKinnon played a mournful piano in Saturday Night Live’s first post-election cold open, singing “Hallelujah.”
Hallelujah.
The only thing that dimmed excitement for tonight’s episode was the prospect of a last merry-go-round with Jim Carrey’s Joe Biden. He six-shootered, he stretched his mouth like gum—but then the cold open wisely passed the baton from Carrey (who’s just wonderful, in any other role) to Maya Rudolph. God bless the costumer who found an ivory pantsuit and silk blouse that looked identical to the ones Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, wore during her rousing acceptance speech just hours earlier. A giddy Rudolph took the audience to church, joyfully reciting the list of her firsts. First female! First Black! First Indian-American! And, with a deeply felt look of pride, first biracial person! “If any of that terrifies you,” she said, “then, well, I don’t give a funt.”
As Biden and Harris bopped to “You About to Lose Yo Job,” we checked in on lame duck president Donald Trump. There sat a pouting Alec Baldwin, bathed in somber light at the piano, self-pitying to the Village People. It was a lovely full circle moment, a national nightmare that began with a woman searching for grace and ended with a small man whimpering to himself about his strength. You’re free now, Alec. Go change diapers.
We all came tonight, though, for Dave Chappelle. Joe Biden and Harris had already addressed the nation. Now it was Chappelle’s turn. He’d been there when Trump went in, and now mercifully again on the President’s way out.
Chappelle’s monologue feels more deserving of a graduate thesis or a deep, languorous bar conversation (remember those?) than a hasty pre-dawn recap. It began with his security cigarette in an ashtray and him in a sharp suit, talking about his great grandfather–enslaved until he was 10 years old. He became a man devoted to education, the liberation of Black people, and Jesus Christ. There was the gentlest rebuke of all of us happily thinking America is a safe place again now that the White House has fallen from the sky and crushed Trump beneath it. Remember the weekly dread of another mass shooting? “Thank God for COVID!” Chappelle said. ‘Somebody had to lock these murderous whites up. Keep ‘em in the house.”
The grievance mentality of white people, especially poor white people in small towns like his beloved Ohio home base, seemed to weigh heavily on Chappelle’s mind. “You don’t even want to wear your mask because it’s oppressive. Try wearing the mask I been wearing all these years,” he said.
He faced away from the audience with his cigarette in his mouth, and then, like a weary superhero, turned back, declaring “Now Trump is gone.” There was great audience cheering, but you could tell he was getting ready to go in hard. As he schooled us about how the Black vote alone saved us from another four years of Trump, Chappelle warned that white people in general “don’t know how to survive yourselves.”
He marveled at Trump’s manic arrogance, stumbling around for a cure for COVID at a live press conference. At the paralysis of enablers like Dr. Birx. At the hilarity of Trump’s own positive diagnosis, and the hellish absurdity of a man who paid $750 in federal taxes receiving white-glove Walter Reed care. But he was both appalled and unsurprised that after four years, white people would still elect a man only interested in self-preservation, who never gave a shit if his so-called allies suffered and died.
His monologue wrapped up in a way that, amazingly, hearkened to Biden’s earlier call for empathy and healing. “It’s good to be a humble winner,” Chappelle cautioned. What if the real enemy isn’t before you, but within you? What if the end-goal weren’t vengeance, but joy? Chappelle seems to have found his own answer, even as the groundbreaking sketch series he so spectacularly walked away from years ago is suddenly streaming at no profit to him. Even as his neighbors fuss about the noise of his cornfield shows, which are pumping needed money into his town. Even as he might wonder what atrocities his storied great-grandfather endured as a child, and Black parents today still don’t trust that their children are safe in America.