Dave Chappelle joked at Madison Square Garden in New York on Saturday that he had felt better since the killing of Charlie Kirk, turning a line about the dangers of public speaking into a punchline.
“Ever since that guy Charlie Kirk got murdered … and I shouldn’t say this publicly, but I feel better,” Chappelle told the audience in a short clip from the show. He went on to joke that he would catch himself driving around wondering why he was in such a good mood.
The clip captures laughter from the audience. The footage circulating online shows only a brief excerpt of Chappelle’s stand-up set.
Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University on 10 September 2025.
Chappelle spoke about the shooting in his Netflix special The Unstoppable, released last December. He said he was shaken by seeing a fellow public speaker killed and challenged comparisons between Kirk and Martin Luther King Jr. He argued that the work of an online political commentator was fundamentally different from that of the civil rights leader.
Hero photo credits. Dave Chappelle by John Bauld (CC BY 2.0) and Charlie Kirk by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 4.0). Photos cropped and combined. The split image is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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