Comedian Dave Chappelle offered an inside look at the Saturday Night Live (SNL) writers’ room after it was revealed that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
A funeral would have been more lively.
Chappelle, speaking with fellow comic Mo Amer on Variety magazine’s “Actors on Actors” series, recalled hosting the show on the first Saturday after that historic election. However, he also drew on the reactions of the writers and cast as they prepared during the week.
“Man, when they called Donald Trump the winner – that s*** shut the writers’ room down,” he said, promoting hearty laughter from Amer.
“You should have seen them in there – the first one – boy, they was crying … They couldn’t believe that this was happening.”
(Warning – Language)
Dave Chappelle reveals what the SNL writer’s room looked like when Trump got elected in 2016: “That s**t shut the writers room down.”https://t.co/VW4gwr7t8l pic.twitter.com/JwHTe9nyd9
— Variety (@Variety) June 4, 2025
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the time. The tears. The hugs. It, without a doubt, would have been the funniest thing SNL had produced in years.
They were sitting on comedy gold and didn’t even know it.
Amer said he knew what was coming, but Chappelle admits, like most entertainers at the time living in a bubble, that he never saw the Trump victory as a possibility. That’s what made it so delicious.
“Yeah, because you live in Texas and I live in Ohio, but at 30 Rock, it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win. I don’t know what looks different from those windows,” Chappelle joked. “But yeah, man, it surprised me.”
RELATED: Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock: SNL’s Election Night
Chappelle also spoke a bit about his opening monologue during that post-election episode, one in which he surprised viewers by bucking the trend in Hollywood and suggesting he’d like to give Trump a chance.
“I’m wishing Donald Trump luck,” he said at the time. “And I’m gonna give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too.”
“I haven’t watched it in a while, but I remember it fondly,” Chappelle said of that opening monologue.
The comedian, however, goes on to note that some of his comments didn’t age well, but he has no regrets.
“Oh, I remember that part. But you know what? I look at it like a photograph. That’s what it felt like in that moment,” he explained. “Now, if it ages well or not, I don’t get mad if I look at a picture because it’s not today. That’s what it was at that time.”
“You might look at an old set and cringe, but you could just cringe because of how you were at that time.”
It seemed to age just fine. Perhaps if others in Hollywood, the media, and the Democratic party had given Trump a chance from the word go, our country wouldn’t have been so divided, ultimately leading to the chaos of the 2020 election and the next four years, which almost destroyed America.
SNL and its writers haven’t learned much about giving the President and his supporters a chance. Earlier this year, they had Tom Hanks appear in a skit involving the actor portraying MAGA supporters as racists.
The skit in question involved Hanks playing a Trump supporter who was too terrified to shake the hand of a black man. because that’s realistic.
I wonder how bad the tears were flowing when Trump defeated Kamala in November?
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