It's been hard to make America laugh this week, but Saturday Night Live chose perhaps the best man for this particular job: Dave Chappelle.
"I didn't know that Donald Trump was going to win the election," Chappelle started in his monologue last night. "I did suspect it. It seemed like Hillary was doing well in the polls and yet — I know the whites. You guys aren't as full of surprises as you used to be...We've actually elected an Internet troll as our president...I haven't seen whites this mad since the O.J. verdict."
Chappelle didn't hold back. Using the n-word four times throughout his monologue, he covered everything from the racial undertones of Harambe to Black Lives Matter to gentrification in arguably one of the greatest SNL moments in the show's history. But the real gem lies within the last two minutes, when he gets serious about Donald Trump and the presidents of our past:
"A few weeks ago I went to the White House for a party. It was the first time I've been there in many years and it was very exciting. And BET sponsored the party, so everyone there was black. And it was beautiful. I walked through the gates — you know, I'm from Washington, so I saw the bus stop, or the corner where the bus stop used to be, where I used to catch the bus to school and dream about nights like tonight.
It was a really, really beautiful night. At the end of the night everyone went into the West Wing of the White House and it was a huge party. And everybody in there was black — except for Bradley Cooper, for some reason.
And on the walls were pictures of all the presidents, of the past. Now, I'm not sure if this is true, but to my knowledge the first black person that was officially invited to the White House was Frederick Douglass. They stopped him at the gates. Abraham Lincoln had to walk out himself and escort Frederick Douglass into the White House, and it didn't happen again, as far as I know, until Roosevelt was president. Roosevelt was president, he had a black guy over and got so much flack from the media that he literally said, "I will never have a nigger in this house again.'
I thought about that, and I looked at that black room, and saw all those black faces, and Bradley, and I saw how happy everybody was. These people who had been historically disenfranchised. It made me feel hopeful and it made me feel proud to be an American and it made me very happy about the prospects of our country. So, in that spirit, I'm wishing Donald Trump luck. And I'm going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too."
Chappelle helped the entire episode get real about the racial divide, with a little help from Chris Rock in the first sketch of the episode: "Election Night," which compared the naive optimism of white voters to the tone-deaf way white people gloss over systemic racism in America.
