Saturday Night Live’s stand-up heavy slate of hosts continues this weekend, as Dave Chappelle returns to host the show for the second time. It’s an explicit callback to 2016, when Chappelle hosted the episode right after that presidential election. (Hopefully they can resist the urge to have Alec Baldwin play “Hallelujah” this time.) It’s the most hyperspecific SNL hosting niche of all time: Chappelle’s now the go-to host for the first episodes after presidential elections.
Chappelle was just starting to make his comedy comeback when he hosted back in 2016. His run of Netflix stand-up specials hadn’t started yet, and although he made some late night appearances between 2014 and 2016, his monologue that night was his most prominent TV appearance in a decade at that point. His 11-minute monologue, which he ended by declaring that he was willing to give Trump a chance as long as Trump was willing to give the American people a chance, won Chappelle an Emmy the next year. If you haven’t seen it, or want to watch it again, here it is.
This year Chappelle will be hosting under very different electoral circumstances. It’s pretty clear at this point that Biden won—he received the most votes of any presidential candidate ever, and is poised to carry most of the states that haven’t been officially called yet. Of course Trump is refusing to accept the vote counts, claiming that he’s won states he hasn’t won, that the votes that have tipped the race towards Biden are “illegal,” and that he’ll sue all the way up to the Supreme Court if those “illegal” votes aren’t tossed out. So basically Chappelle, who can be one of our most searing and insightful comedians when he’s not too deep into his cynicism or his anti-PC schtick, will be given a national network platform during the most worrisome electoral crisis since 2000.
Now if only it wasn’t on a show that inexcusably gave Trump a huge platform during the 2016 campaign, huh?
SNL hasn’t released any new promos featuring Chappelle—he honestly doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be willing to make those. Instead they’ve released this teaser that’s mostly just a dude walking through an empty studio. Check it out below, and if you want to see his return, it’ll be on Saturday Night Live this Saturday at 11:30 p.m. ET. The Foo Fighters are the musical guest, in what would’ve been one of the biggest possible lineups in 2006.