Dave Chappelle made Saturday Night Live history tonight, with a monologue that ran nearly 17 minutes.
That’s nearly a minute longer than the now second-longest monologue in show history, which was delivered by—you guessed it—Dave Chappelle, whose Season 46 monologue in 2020 clocked in at 16 minutes and 9 seconds.
For reference, most host’s monologues are usually around five minutes long or shorter.
As first reported by our podcast partners at the Saturday Night Network in their live SNL after show, Chappelle’s monologue at tonight’s dress rehearsal was far shorter, coming in at nine minutes.
Chappelle covered a lot of ground in his SNL set tonight, including the L.A. wildfires, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio (which he noted is one town over from his home in Yellow Springs), Diddy, Jimmy Carter and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Donald Trump’s return to office.
He also put to rest some speculation surrounding his absence at the show’s post-election episode. This past November marked the first time Chappelle hadn’t hosted the show’s first episode after the presidential election since 2012.
In his monologue tonight, Chappelle said that he was indeed asked to host the post-election show, but he had requested to host the episode closest to January 6th instead.
