This comes across as Silverman carrying water for her old friend: No, really, he cares about liberal politics despite the fact that his recent comedy often aligns with conservative, conspiratorial talking points! Silverman herself publicly called out Chappelle for what she called a “wildly antisemitic” Saturday Night Live monologue in 2022. At the time, Chappelle claimed that Jewish Americans were scapegoating Black figures like Kyrie Irving and Kanye “Ye” West (who has only gone deeper down the antisemitism rabbit hole in the years since). “[Fuck], the idea of calling out massively influential zillionaire superstars for posting lies and promoting hatred of Jews is ‘the Jews blaming their troubles on Black Americans’ is fucking insane. I can’t believe I have to say this,” Silverman responded on her podcast at the time.
But in 2023, she told The New Yorker she hadn’t talked to Chappelle about it in person. “I have no idea if he heard it. I also feel, like, I was so affected by it [the monologue], and now I’m so over it, because that’s what talking about things does. I’ve known him since he was seventeen and I was nineteen. But he texted me out of nowhere and he said, ‘I love you.’ And I said, ‘I love you, too.’ So, you know, I don’t know if that means he listened to it. It didn’t matter,” she said. “He’s not antisemitic. All of his best friends are Jewish. But it hit hard because he’s so influential. He influenced me! And it wasn’t any of the jokes. I thought the jokes were fucking hilarious. It was the two serious things [he said] that really frightened me in this current landscape.”
Obviously, it’s Silverman’s choice how she decides to conduct her decades-long friendship with Dave Chappelle, but it’s a curious scenario that includes holding someone accountable publicly without ever discussing it privately. Of course we have no idea if they’ve had a frank conversation about it since, but her comments on Chappelle following her podcast episode seem designed more to protect and defend him than anything else. Rolling Stone reports that Silverman didn’t want to relitigate the incident, but she did comment generally on the men in our society who hyperfixate on transgender rights, as Chappelle has done with increased frequency over the years.
“Men have been raised to not be able to feel, not be able to express themselves,” Silverman observes. “The only acceptable emotion for some reason is anger. So what happens? They feel shame and that immediately, like sugar getting converted to carbs, that gets converted into rage and outward blame. And that’s how they survive. When I see that anger directed at the trans community, at the nonspecific, nonbinary, it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with themselves. It’s ego and the terror of ‘If that’s who they are, then who am I? Where do I fall?'”
