Dave Chappelle and “SNL” Made the Case for Go Bags

The comedian hosted the show's first new episode of 2025

Dave Chappelle on "SNL"
Dave Chappelle hosted the first new "SNL" of 2025.
NBCUniversal

The Los Angeles wildfires came up a few times on this week’s Saturday Night Live, the show’s first new episode of the year. Host Dave Chappelle alluded to the fires’ devastation in his (17-minute!) opening monologue, including mentioning colleagues who had lost their homes. Chappelle also took the lead in a sketch about a family who receives an evacuation notification due to the approaching fires; as is often the case in sketch comedy, things took a turn.

Humor around natural disasters isn’t easy to pull off, and it becomes clear fairly early in the sketch that the humor in the sketch will be more based around the family’s attempts to get their go bags ready than about the danger they face. Somewhere between the moment when Chappelle gleefully took a sledgehammer to the living room wall and when Michael Longfellow showed up as an irate Bosnian hitman, it becomes clear just how far from its basic premise things had gone.

The sketch finds Chappelle, Ego Nwodim and Devon Walker in full-on farce mode, with Nwodim and Walker playing their escalating alarm at learning that their husband and father may be involved in some very dodgy behavior, which includes thumb drives, a surprising amount of French and a map that doesn’t smell right.

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It’s also a spot-on parody of countless action films in which a seemingly buttoned-down person turns out to have a secretly violent past. (This year alone brings us Back in Action, which debuted this week on Netflix, and the forthcoming Love Hurts.) And if you’ve ever wondered what it might look like if Chappelle opted for a Bob-Odenkirk-in-Nobody-esque career pivot, wonder no more.

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