Michelle Wolf infamously roasted Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other members of the GOP so hard at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that journalists on both sides were pissed off. It’s no surprise, then, that the comedian—who recently released a new Netflix special called It’s Great To Be Here—is not exactly in the business of being swayed by other people’s opinions.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Wolf was asked about controversial comics Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K., neither of whom she shied away from discussing.
Chappelle—who has been in hot water multiple times but most notably for his transphobic jokes in 2021 special The Closer—is actually a close personal friend of Wolf’s, she said—close enough, in fact, for her to live with him and his family in their Ohio home for the better part of a year during the pandemic. “Dave is the kindest, most generous person I know. And he’s also great at comedy,” she said, explaining that the standups would often do “cornfield shows” together in 2020. When the interviewer pressed her on Chappelle’s views, Wolf responded:
I think people really miss a lot of what he’s saying. He says it very clearly in his one special: “Why was it easier for Caitlyn Jenner to change her gender than it was for Cassius Clay to change his name?” I think that spells it out right there. He wants everyone to be able to live the way they want to live, including Black people. Time and time again we see that, as a country, we literally don’t want Black people to live and we don’t do anything about it. They try to act like Dave is some sort of villain when he’s not. He’s a hero. He’s fighting for his people.
Wolf is also critical of the #MeToo movement in her special, calling it “the worst-run movement I’ve ever seen,” because, as she explained to RS, “I think it was a very black-and-white approach that they took, when in fact it was an incredibly gray subject matter that required a lot of conversations that we literally weren’t allowed to have.” Her following comments on Louis C.K. probably fall into that bucket.
“Louis, I feel, is the only one who actually admitted to anything or apologized. And we can go back and forth about how good or bad his apology was, but I don’t think you’re ever going to have an apology that everyone is going to be happy with,” she said. “He’s the only one who did that, and it seems like he got punished the most for it… He apologized and wants to make things better, and instead people were like, ‘No, you can’t. There’s no way for you to make things better unless you do this and this.’ But nobody said what ‘this and this’ was. Nobody said what he could do because nobody agreed on what he could do.”
You can read Wolf’s full Rolling Stone interview here.
