No matter how much has changed over the past decade, one thing remains true: Saturday Night Live never brings in Dave Chappelle for a filler episode. The comedian has now hosted the show four times in just more than eight years, each stint coming on the heels of a pivotal election. Last night, in the SNL installment preceding President-Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, Chappelle opened his monologue by detailing his attempts to turn down the daunting gig this time around. The SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels had apparently tried persuading Chappelle to again take the stage following the 2024 presidential election; Chappelle spent the several weeks prior to and after Trump’s reelection rejecting the offer. He eventually relented, he said, so that “I could just get rid of all these old Trump jokes and start fresh.”

That lead-in suggested that Chappelle might spend the rest of his set revisiting familiar comedic territory. But where Chappelle has previously doubled down on his right to offend, he instead used the moment to lay the groundwork for sharp, wide-ranging commentary. “The moment I said yes, L.A. burst into flames,” he quipped, following up with the kind of posturing that audiences have come to expect from him: He acknowledged that it’s too soon to laugh about the wildfires still ravaging Southern California, then threw the camera a mischievous wink. The veteran comic knows where the line is, he seemed to be saying, and revels in crossing it simply because he can. In a marked contrast to his earlier SNL appearances, though—including his one in 2022, for which he received criticism for perceived anti-Semitic remarks—the comedian seemed mellower. And not only did Chappelle demonstrate an interest in unity, but he also offered viewers an unexpected and sincere-sounding plea for compassion.

[Read: Does Dave Chappelle find anything funnier than being cancelled?]

Chappelle wrapped his nearly 20-minute act with a direct appeal to the divided country and its incoming president. He ended with a timely anecdote about connecting with others amid deeply entrenched conflicts. Chappelle said that in the mid-aughts, after walking away from his eponymous hit show, he spent some time soul-searching in the Middle East. The comedian recalled that the late former President Jimmy Carter flew to Israel during that period; Carter was there to promote his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. Chappelle described Carter’s insistence on then going “to the Palestinian territory” despite the Israeli government saying it would be too dangerous. “I will never forget the images of a former American president walking with little to no security while thousands of Palestinians were cheering him on, and when I saw that picture, it brought tears to my eyes,” he said.

He continued:

The presidency is no place for petty people, so Donald Trump—I know you watch the show—man, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you, whether they like you or not. They’re all counting on you. The whole world is counting on you. And I mean this when I say this: Good luck. Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity. And please, have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.

Last night’s call to presidential action was a stark departure from Chappelle’s earlier comments about Trump during the comic’s SNL debut, in an awkward, unsettling episode following Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016. Chappelle stole the show with a monologue (and a Chris Rock–assisted skit) that conveyed his lack of surprise at Trump’s ascendancy. But Chappelle ended on a more serious note. He waxed poetic about the hopefulness he felt after seeing a sea of Black faces at a party held in the Obama White House: “So, in that spirit, I’m wishing Donald Trump luck,” he said. “And I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too.” A few months later, the comic reportedly said he regretted being “the first guy on TV to say, ‘Give Trump a chance.’”

Chappelle deployed his trademark barbed humor to further thoughtful ends last night—even when he wasn’t talking about Trump. After running through a list of famous friends who lost their homes in the L.A. fires, the comic mocked the replies he’d seen on videos of the blazes. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, it serves these celebrities right. I hope their houses burned down,’” he said. “You see that? That right there—that’s why I hate poor people.” Chappelle then took a drag from his cigarette, waited for the audience to finish laughing, and got to the real punch line: “’Cause they can’t see past their own pain.” The comic went on to emphasize the country’s glaring economic inequality while expressing concern for people outside his own wealthy milieu. He spoke about the working-class families that found out the week of the fires that their fire-insurance coverage had been revoked; when he seemingly misspoke by saying “health insurance,” Chappelle suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, could help either way. It was a grim joke, one that telegraphed his understanding that many Americans feel exploited by both industries—and reminded viewers that he can still bring people’s experiences into his comedy.

[Read: Chappelle was right]

Of course, Chappelle was still himself, throwing in a handful of musings about how scary it is to be famous right now and making a cringe-worthy comparison between West Hollywood and Sodom. A later sketch also saw him revisiting some of Chappelle’s Show’s most memorable (and outrageous) characters. But the stand-up never took the lazy, condescending tack that’s made him divisive among critics in recent years. (Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer, which premiered on Netflix last month, kicks off with a lengthy segment that rehashes his stalest material.) Chappelle instead drew on his experiences of living in the Midwest—something he also did, to compelling effect, when he hosted SNL after the 2020 presidential election. From this personal angle, he sought to elucidate the similarities between demographics that look wildly different at first glance. It didn’t always work perfectly, then or now, but it felt refreshingly human.

Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable. According to Carnegie, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency partly because his campaign manager addressed voters by their names. The Steel King, Andrew Carnegie (no relation), reportedly secured business deals by naming companies after at least one competitor and a would-be buyer, and maintained employee morale by calling his factory workers by their first name. “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia. People who feel it most severely might avoid addressing anyone by their name under any circumstance. For others, alexinomia is strongest around those they are closest to. For example, I don’t have trouble with most names, but when my sister and I are alone together, saying her name can feel odd and embarrassing, as if I’m spilling a secret, even though I’ve been saying her name for nearly 25 years. Some people can’t bring themselves to say the name of their wife or boyfriend or best friend—it can feel too vulnerable, too formal, or too plain awkward. Dale Carnegie was onto something: Names have a kind of power. How we use or avoid them can be a surprising window into the nature of our relationships and how we try to shape them.

The social function of names in Western society is, in many ways, an outlier. In many cultures, saying someone else’s given name is disrespectful, especially if they have higher status than you. Even your siblings, parents, and spouse might never utter your name to you. Opting for relationship terms (auntie) or unrelated nicknames (little cabbage) is the default. Meanwhile, American salespeople are trained to say customers’ names over and over again. It’s also a common tactic for building rapport in business pitches, during telemarketing calls, and on first dates.

Western norms can make sidestepping names a source of distress. For years, Thomas Ditye, a psychologist at Sigmund Freud Private University, in Vienna, and his colleague Lisa Welleschik listened as their clients described their struggles to say others’ names. In the 2023 study that coined the term alexinomia, Ditye and his colleagues interviewed 13 German-speaking women who found the phenomenon relatable. One woman told him that she couldn’t say her classmates’ names when she was younger, and after she met her husband, the issue became more pronounced. “Even to this day, it’s still difficult for me to address him by name; I always say ‘you’ or ‘hey,’ things like that,” she said. In a study published last year, Ditye and his colleagues searched online English-language discussion forums and found hundreds of posts in which men and women from around the world described how saying names made them feel weird. The team has also created an alexinomia questionnaire, with prompts that include “Saying the name of someone I like makes me feel exposed” and “I prefer using nicknames with my friends and family in order to avoid using names.”

[From the April 2023 issue: An ode to nicknames]

Names are a special feature of conversation in part because they’re almost always optional. When an element of a conversation isn’t grammatically necessary, its use is likely socially meaningful, Steven Clayman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me. Clayman has studied broadcast-news journalists’ use of names in interviews, and found that saying someone’s name could signal—without saying so directly—that you’re speaking from the heart. But the implications of name-saying can shift depending on what’s happening at the moment someone says a name and who’s saying it; we all know that if your mom uses your name, it usually means you’re in trouble. Even changing where in the sentence the name falls can emphasize disagreement or make a statement more adversarial. “Shayla, you need to take a look at this” can sound much friendlier than “You need to take a look at this, Shayla.” And, of course, when someone says your name excessively, they sound like an alien pretending to be a human. “It may be that folks with alexinomia have this gut intuition, which is correct, that to use a name is to take a stand, to do something—and maybe something you didn’t intend,” Clayman said. Another person could misinterpret you saying their name as a sign of closeness or hostility. Why not just avoid the issue?

In his case studies and review of internet forums, Ditye noticed that many people mentioned tripping up on the names of those they were most intimate with—like me, with my sister. This might sound counterintuitive, but saying the names of people already close to us can feel “too personal, too emotional, to a degree that it’s unpleasant,” Ditye told me, even more so than saying the name of a stranger. Perhaps the stakes are higher with those we love, or the intimacy is exaggerated. People on the forums agreed that avoiding loved ones’ names was a way to manage closeness, but sometimes in the opposite way. “I think this is pretty common among close couples,” one person wrote. “It’s a good thing.” Using a name with your nearest and dearest can feel impersonal, like you’re a used car salesman trying to close a deal. If I say my boyfriend’s name, it does seem both too formal and too revealing. But if I use his nickname—Squint—I feel less awkward.

[Read: Why we speak more weirdly at home]

Alexinomia is a mostly harmless quirk of the human experience. (It can cause problems in rare cases, Ditye told me, if, say, you can’t call out a loved one’s name when they’re walking into traffic.) Still, if you avoid saying the names of those closest to you, it can skew their perception of how you feel about them. One of Ditye’s study participants shared that her husband was upset by her inability to say his name. It made him feel unloved.

As Dale Carnegie wrote, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Pushing through the discomfort and simply saying their name every now and then can remind your loved ones that you care. By saying someone else’s name, even when it’s awkward, you’ll be offering a bit of yourself at the same time.