The claims about Chappelle were made in regard to his monologue on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and StopAntisemitism have slammed the comedian for his routine that discussed Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving’s recent antisemitic statements and social media posts.
Stewart started out in the stand-up comedy world with Chappelle, and the two have maintained a friendship for many years. They starred in the 1998 stoner comedy Half Baked together and have shared stages together while Stewart rose to global fame as host of The Daily Show before moving on to eventually host The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+.
“Everybody calls me like, ‘You see Dave on SNL?’ And I say yes, we’re very good friends. I always watch and send nice texts,” Stewart told host Stephen Colbert. “‘He normalized antisemitism with the monologue.’ I don’t know if you’ve been on comment sections on most news articles, but it’s pretty normal. It’s incredibly normal. But the one thing I will say is I don’t believe that censorship and penalties are the way to end antisemitism or to gain understanding. I don’t believe in that. It’s the wrong way for us to approach it.”
“I’ve been to Hollywood. And I don’t want y’all to get mad at me, I’m just telling you this is just what I saw. It’s a lot of Jews. Like a lot,” Chappelle said in one of his controversial Saturday Night Live jokes. “But that doesn’t mean anything, you know what I mean? There’s a lot of Black people in Ferguson, Missouri. It doesn’t mean we run the place.”
Speaking with Colbert, Stewart said, “Dave said something in the SNL monologue that I thought was constructive, which he says, ‘It shouldn’t be this hard to talk about things.’”
He continued, “Whether it be comedy or discussion or anything else, if we don’t have the wherewithal to meet each other with what’s reality then how do we move forward? If we all just shut it down, then we retreat to our little corners of misinformation and it metastasizes. The whole point of all this is to not let it metastasize and to get it out in the air and talk about it.”
Stewart also discussed West—who legally changed his name to Ye in 2021—and Irving. Regarding the Brooklyn Nets star, Stewart seemed to disagree with the team’s decision to suspend the point guard for sharing a link on social media for a film that contains antisemitic content.
“Penalizing somebody for having a thought—I don’t think is the way to change their minds or gain understanding,” Stewart said.
“Something Kanye said on his tour—he got interviewed by five different people because the media model is arson and conflict—he said, ‘Hurt people hurt people,’” Stewart said of Ye. “Look at it from a Black perspective. It’s a culture that feels that its wealth has been extracted by different groups…That’s the feeling in that community, and if you don’t understand where it’s coming from then you can’t deal with it.”
Newsweek reached out to Stewart for additional comment.
Do you have a tip on an entertainment story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about comedy? Let us know via entertainment@newsweek.com.
