Dave Chappelle and Bowen Yang Hug It Out After Earlier Standoff
After a brief embrace at the end of the latest episode of Saturday Night Live, it appears a truce has been called in the cold war between funny guys Dave Chappelle and Bowen Yang. If, in fact, they were ever in a war at all.
The whispers began early last year when Chappelle unexpectedly turned up for the goodnight portion of Dakota Johnson’s episode. Eagle-eyed fans noted that while Chappelle positioned himself stage left, Yang found a spot on the opposite side of the stage as far from Chappelle as possible.
Pride.com had theories about the icy distance, suggesting Yang was angry about Chappelle’s “self-identifying as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF, and for promoting nasty and homophobic rhetoric in his Netflix specials The Closer and The Dreamer.” The site also noted that Yang, Sarah Sherman and Molly Kearney didn’t participate in taping the previous episode Chappelle had hosted — an assertion we told you was false. All three SNL stars were featured in that show.
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Yang addressed the online-centric controversy last June, telling Variety, “I stand where I always stand on goodnights. It was not a physical distance that anyone was creating. It had to do with so many things that were completely internal.” He also told Variety that it was “jarring” that the incident — can we really call it an incident? — had made headlines at all.
Even as Entertainment Weekly shared the news that Chappelle and Yang shared a squeeze at the end of Saturday night’s episode, it poured more kerosene on the imaginary embers to see if they might burst into flame. “The moment marked their first onscreen interaction of the night, as Yang did not appear in any sketches with Chappelle,” noted EW.
Yep, it’s true. Yang and Chappelle didn’t appear in a sketch together. But for the record, Chappelle also didn’t get funny with James Austin Johnson, Emil Wakim, Michael Che, Colin Jost or the Please Don’t Destroy guys. If every female cast member hadn’t been standing in a line during the Pop the Balloon sketch — most of them didn’t have a speaking role — that list would have included half the cast. The same phenomenon applies to nearly every show. With 20 cast members, a good percentage never share the stage with the host.
Nice try, EW, but this observation isn’t setting off the smoke detector.
Don’t bother going to social media to confirm all is well between Yang and Chappelle. Twitter is bursting with fans breaking down the embrace as if it’s the Zapruder film, either concluding that brave Yang was doing his best to avoid the host or that the SNL veteran isn’t funny in the first place. It’s two seconds of innocuous hug footage being used to vaguely support whatever opinion the poster had about the comics in the first place.
My two cents: Chappelle and Yang is the least beefy comedian beef going. Can we stop trying to make it happen? Or at least get Katt Williams involved?
