No one was supposed to see the videos of the comedian Dave Chappelle appearing to joke about the death of Charlie Kirk.

“I feel f**ked up saying this,” Chappelle said during a set at Madison Square Garden this weekend, multiple recordings of which circulated on X. “It’s scary being a public speaker. And I mean, look, ever since that guy Charlie Kirk got murdered — and I shouldn’t say this publicly, but — ”

He paused for the punchline: “ — I feel better.”

Chappelle went on: “I know I shouldn’t say that, but it’s just a feeling. I just be driving around, like, ‘Why am I in such a good mood?’”

The clips about Kirk are short, and it’s unclear what preceded or followed the bit in the routine.

In another video from Chappelle’s two-night set, the comedian seemed to suggest that Kirk, who was shot and killed while speaking at a Turning Point USA event at a Utah university last September, was in hell: “I’m sure he’s looking up at us right now, laughing so hard he can’t breathe.”

The comic legend has a strict no-phones policy at his shows, but a few blurry clips emerged nonetheless. Conservative commentators quickly condemned the bit. The next day, without naming Chappelle, Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, called comedians joking about her husband’s death “beyond disgusting” and decried a culture that uses the “destruction of a human life” as a “punchline.” Elon Musk declared Chappelle “just not funny anymore.”

Chappelle has built his career on a readiness to push the bounds of acceptability — originally with scalding routines about racism and racial stereotyping, and then with provocations toward people he considered oversensitive or censorious. In the past few years, he’s been the subject of criticism from the left for his jokes about gay and trans people.

His jokes about Kirk seem to represent a shift in the winds on two levels. For Chappelle, who did not respond to requests for comment, it treated conservatives as the easily provoked parties, in the way he’d assigned to the left. And in the broader culture, the jokes in a sold-out arena suggest just how much the tides have turned since the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing, during which those who criticized him, or simply quoted Kirk’s own inflammatory remarks, faced investigations, firings and even arrest.

On Thursday, after the midterm election resulted in a historic blue wave, the liberal commentator Jennifer Welch was reading aloud posts from X on her left-leaning podcast, “I’ve Had It.” One of the posts she read said: “We’re digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again” and Welch laughed as she read it, and then for some time afterward. The post Welch read received over two million views and more than 200,000 likes, before the person who posted it made their account private.

The reaction to Welch’s laughter was swift. Ben Shapiro’s conservative outlet, The Daily Wire, called it “evil.” Several of the podcast’s sponsors, including the multibillion-dollar pet-supplies delivery company Chewy, condemned the comment, and some — like Cash App and the eyewear brand Zenni — said they would no longer advertise on the show altogether.

Welch and her co-host Angie Sullivan both apologized for laughing about the joke, calling it insensitive. Still, Welch accused the organization Kirk founded, Turning Point USA, of “trying to ignite a war with us because they want to prove to their donors, ‘we can cancel libs.’” In an emailed statement, the podcasters said they “still have plenty of advertisers and we aren’t going anywhere.”

This wasn’t the only time Kirk and Chappelle’s careers improbably intersected. In 2022, Kirk posted on X calling for criminal charges against an audience member who had attacked Chappelle on stage. By declining to charge the attacker — who the LAPD said had a replica handgun containing a knife blade — the district attorney had, Kirk wrote, sent “a clear message that public acts of political violence are justifiable—and even encouraged—against anyone who dares speak out against The Regime.”