David Spade, the Just Shoot Me star, told his Fly on the Wall podcast co-host Dana Carvey that Hollywood should stop labeling award winners and crew members by race and gender. Spade said award-show announcers who note a winner’s firsts should knock it off: “On race, let me just say at any of these award shows, I saw a clip the other day saying, ’And this gentleman won, and he’s the first Black director to win for this documentary.’ I wish they would quit saying that.”
He continued, “’Oh, the first in 30 years to have a Black actor win this.’ If you just say we’re all actors … now this is my point of view, that it just makes it more even and not, we’re all just the same,” and he urged the industry to “stop separating us like that.”
Spade tied the point to his years on NBC’s Just Shoot Me, which ran from 1997 to 2003. When a female director worked an episode that week, the crew announced it. “Female director. It feels like a little, not condescending, but a little diminishing,” Spade said. He described his reply at the time: “That’s fine. Just is it a director? Yeah. Okay, we got it.” He added, “So, I was a big proponent of fighting that.” Carvey agreed that “female director” is “a funny thing to say,” then joked about hearing an Emmy announcement call him the “198th straight white male that has won this award.”
The remarks fit a pattern that predates this episode. In August 2021, Spade told Variety, “Now you say the one wrong move and you’re canceled. It’s a very tough world out there.” In the same interview he said, “I hope comics are allowed to be comics. I really hope so.” In March, he blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass for Hollywood’s decline, saying of CBS Radford, the lot where he filmed Just Shoot Me, “Thanks, Karen Bass. Thanks, Gavin.” By April he told guest Tim Dillon that he “got in trouble” and “wasn’t really mad at” them, and he wanted Hollywood made “slightly more of a priority.”
Spade has also changed his mind in public before. In the 1990s, on Saturday Night Live’s “Hollywood Minute,” he showed a picture of Eddie Murphy after Vampire in Brooklyn flopped and said, “Look, children, it’s a falling star. Make a wish.” Murphy told The New York Times in 2024, “I felt it was racist.” Spade had already written in his 2015 memoir Almost Interesting, “I’ve come to see Eddie’s point on this one.”
A comedian with three decades in the business is now telling the industry that its own labels diminish the people they celebrate. Hollywood spent the last decade building those announcements into award-show scripts. Which of its executives will say publicly that Spade has a point?