In many respects, Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency on Tuesday bears similarities to his shock 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. So much so, that the SNL sketch below from 2016 — featuring Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, and portraying anxious white voters at an election watch party who are hoping for a Hillary win — actually holds up pretty well, considering how the race for the White House this year also turned out.
As the watch party in the sketch unfolds, Chappelle has to keep reminding the Clinton fans not to make any pronouncements prematurely. And then they all start saying stupid things, revealing their surface-level understanding of what’s going on. At one point, Cecily Strong gasps in horror as the night starts to tilt away from Hillary in the sketch: “Oh my God,” she says, “I think America is racist.”
Quips Chappelle in response: “Oh my God. You know, I remember my great-grandfather told me something like that. He was, like, a slave or something” (obviously, the point of this sketch being that the dejected Hillary stans have blinders on when it comes to a huge swath of the country, which seems to have also played out again on Tuesday with Kamala’s loss to Trump).
Open TikTok and Instagram today, in fact, and a lot of what you’ll see is actually unfolding like the election party below. At one point during the SNL sketch, with Chappelle and Rock adopting a kind of “we’ve seen it all before” nonchalance, SNL cast member Beck Bennett dejectedly exclaims: “This is the most shameful thing America has ever done.” Chappelle and Rock, predictably, burst out laughing at the inanity of that statement.
Speaking of SNL, Bill Burr will host the show’s first post-election special this weekend. In addition to what’s sure to be a spicy monologue from the take-no-prisoners comedian, it should go without saying we can also expect more sketches like the one below, offering an attempt to make sense of President-elect Trump’s clear mandate from voters — or, at the very least, to try and find a way to laugh about it all.
