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.”
The original iteration of Saturday Night Live had a similarly blinkered political worldview – the cast and writers thought that easy-going liberal Republican Gerald Ford was the antichrist, simply because he had (R) after his name. But if he had won in 1976 over Jimmy Carter, I can’t imagine sobbing breaking out on the 17th floor of Rockefeller Center; they were made of much sterner stuff. But then, they were underground comics from places like the National Lampoon and the Second City launching a new untested program, rather than Ivy League grads walking into an established franchise that has led to huge movie and TV deals for many in the cast and its writers.