Loading ...Watch S.N.L. Host Aziz Ansari Deliver Scorching Anti-Racist Monologue
Aziz Ansari admitted early that he had a fun job ahead: performing the first late-night monologue after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president. But what could have been an easy, low-hanging-fruit hit job was instead a thoughtful (yet still hilarious) rumination on the rising trend of racism in the U.S., as well as Trump’s responsibility, as president, to heal a fractured nation. What more should we expect from the comedian behind the meditative Netflix series Master of None? Ansari might be one of the more thoughtful voices working in comedy today.
Ansari did start out with one fun, easy dig. Trump’s tweeting tendencies have betrayed the fact that he watches at least some of S.N.L. every week to see how he’s depicted. “Pretty cool,” Ansari smirks, “to know he’s probably at home watching a brown guy make fun of him.” As many news outlets have noted, Ansari is first person of South Asian descent to take on Saturday Night Live hosting duties, and he made nimble use of that fact in his monologue.
Though he may have made light of Trump’s Sunday morning Twitter ritual of bad-mouthing S.N.L., Ansari followed that joke with a plea for President Trump to behave a little differently. “Don’t tweet about me being lame,” Ansari said, speaking directly to Trump, before urging the president to speak out specifically about the emboldened, racist factions of America who have used the election as an excuse to persecute non-white Americans. Ansari, essentially, asked Trump to act presidential. Not such an unreasonable request.
So, no, it wasn’t Trump who was the main target of Ansari’s monologue; it was racists in America. Coining the term “lowercase k.k.k.,” Ansari took aim at the “casual” racism that’s often associated with the alt-right movement led by Trump’s top advisor Steve Bannon. Trump, Ansari argued, needs to put these people firmly in their place. We can’t just go around punching them in the face, right? . . . Right?
