Jon Stewart disagrees with claims that the Saturday Night Live monologue delivered by his friend Dave Chappelle “normalized” antisemitism. The comedian, who is Jewish, appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert yesterday (Nov. 15), where he weighed in on the backlash against Chappelle’s jokes, plus the outrage over antisemitic comments from Kanye West and Kyrie Irving preceding SNL.
The Problem with Jon Stewart host said people had been asking him if he watched Chappelle’s Nov. 12 performance, telling Stephen Colbert that of course he caught the monologue, and always tunes in because the two are “very good friends.”
Responding to claims that Chappelle “normalized antisemitism with the monologue,” Stewart said, “I don’t know if you’ve been on comment sections on most news articles, but it’s pretty fucking 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 not gain understanding. I don’t believe in that, and I think it’s the wrong way for us to approach it.”
Referring to Irving’s controversy — in which he promoted an antisemitic film on social media — Stewart said the answer is education, not a “timeout,” as the Nets player received when he was suspended by the NBA.
“Penalizing someone for having a thought, I don’t think is the way to change their minds or gain understanding. … People think this. People think Jews control Hollywood,” Stewart said. “People think Jews control the banks. And to pretend that they don’t, and to not deal with it in a straightforward manner, we will never gain any kind of understanding with each other.”
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Returning to this past weekend’s SNL, Stewart said one line in Chappelle’s monologue resonated with him most.
“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,’” Stewart said, noting that he’s been hit with antisemitism accusations because he is “against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”
“I’m called other things from other people based on other opinions that I have, but those shut down debate,” Stewart said, adding, “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?”
He closed out his comments by telling Colbert, “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.”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35/10:35c on CBS. Watch Stewart’s appearance in full in the video above.
