'SNL' star Chris Redd says one Kanye West joke is off limits

Two men one not smiling and the other smiling widely

By Nardine SaadStaff Writer

March 18, 2022 12:13 PM PT

“Saturday Night Live” star Chris Redd thinks the Kanye West jokes are “gonna start flying soon” on the NBC sketch comedy.

The show, which also stars the rapper’s latest rival, Pete Davidson, has stayed away from roasting the Grammy winner over the past few months despite his very public feuds and parody-ready behavior. And that’s reportedly because Davidson, who’s dating Ye’s ex-wife and beauty mogul, Kim Kardashian, has asked the show’s writers and performers to leave it alone.

But Redd, who impersonates the “Yeezus” artist on “SNL,” doesn’t think that truce will last much longer given the events of the past few weeks and Ye’s outbursts that have resulted in Instagram suspending him this week.

However, there’s some delicate Ye material that Redd said will remain off limits: his apparent mental-health issues.

Born and bred in Chicago like the rapper, the 36-year-old performer said that “when it comes to Ye, I’m always of the mind that I’ll make fun.”

“I was raised joking. You clown, you clown people. That’s kind of how we come up. ... We’re from the same place. We know the same people,” he said on SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show” this week.

“But at the same time, there is a serious layer to that situation that I just won’t make fun of,” he continued. “Like, I’m not making fun of his mental health. You know, I have my mental health issues myself. So I’m very aware of those things. And I never come from that place of making fun of that specifically.”

That being said, Redd added that the 44-year-old musician’s “irresponsibility of it” is what he’ll make fun of. That, and “his ego, but it’s never those [mental health] things.”

The sketch artist said he doesn’t want to make matters worse for his co-star Davidson, who along with Kardashian, has been publicly harassed by Ye. Enough so that “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah entered the fray in Kardashian’s defense this week.

“It’s just better not to like put your friend in a weird situation by antagonizing a situation more than you need to,” Redd said, with a caveat: “But I’m really tired of sitting on these jokes, though. So I hope they figure that out soon. ‘Cause I ain’t got nothing to do with none of this.”

Like his co-stars, Davidson has readily lampooned himself on the show when his personal life has made headlines. But he has barely commented on his ongoing feud with Ye amid the rapper’s bitter divorce from the reality-TV star.

This week, though, a friend of Davidson leaked purported text messages between Davidson and the recording artist in which he both taunts Ye and offers to meet up with him for a grown-up discussion.

“The King of Staten Island” star argued that he has been nice to Ye despite his antics — which have included blasting Davidson as “Skete” on Instagram, rapping about beating him and brutalizing his likeness in two music videos for “Eazy.”

Chris Redd as Kanye West during the "People's Kourt" sketch on "Saturday Night Live."

Davidson, 28, and “The Kardashians” star, 41, have been romantically linked since October, not long after she shared a kiss with the performer while hosting “SNL.”

In the since-deleted screenshots of the text messages, Davidson insisted that he “stopped SNL from talking about or making fun” of Ye, “which they’ve wanted to do for months” and stopped stand-up comedians “from doing bits” about the rapper because he doesn’t want “the father of my girls kids to look bad out here.”

Redd said that Davidson has been “starting to talk again, and he is handling that well, so I think these jokes [are] gonna start flying soon.”

“Even though me and Ye aren’t friends, I want the best for that dude too. I’m still a fan of his music, you know?” Redd added. “I hope that he, like, learns how to handle this, so they could just move on with their lives.

“But yeah, it’s not interesting to me to stir the pot on something that’s just unhealthy, you know?”