Dave Chappelle, Some Quick Thoughts

I keep some habits, some of them constructive. One of them is ignoring hype.

The world these days is a hype machine, feeding on itself. If media can hype a thing it can sell articles, clicks, ads, plus the product it’s promoting. Everyone walks away happy—except perhaps the discerning consumer.

Even as a child I was disappointed with things hyped: E.T., the compact disc, Michael Jackson.^[1]Some things hyped can in fact be excellent. In instances when I think something has a shot I use one of two approaches. I either see it as early as possible (Pulp Fiction, which I saw on its first … Continue reading Something didn’t feel right. I was supposed to like this thing but I couldn’t. I didn’t. And yet I couldn’t dare say that. It would be a kind of social castration, and besides, who would listen?

But these misses showed me something. There was too often a gap. A gap between social expectation and personal experience. What mattered was experience. And to achieve that I needed to do one thing: think for myself.

Which brings me to Dave Chappelle.

The GOAT?

Dave Chappelle is the king of comedy, the champ or, as he self-proclaims in his latest special The Closer, “the GOAT.”

Agree or disagree, he’s a deserved all-time legend of the craft, in no small measure because he is a man who thinks for himself. How else to explain his thoughtful but sudden departure from the world of comedy (a world that strikes me, despite its pretensions, as having a most brutal herd-like culture) when he was at the seeming peak of his powers? He opted to do something few others do (J.D. Salinger, Bob Dylan and the far less famous Vashti Bunyan come to mind) and for his own reasons.^[2]Of this time he told a CBS interviewer: “I was in this very successful place but the emotional content of it didn’t feel anything like what I imagined success should feel like.”

But thinking for himself also means being a real human being.^[3]For all that Dave Chappelle plays himself up as a regular guy (he lives in a small, if somewhat progressive, Ohio town, tries to sit anonymously at bars and befriends ordinary people with acts of … Continue reading And by that I mean not simply showing his warts (many use controlled vulnerability as a device) but showing his humanity and his kindness. Doing this genuinely is a most difficult task these days.

Not only is there something almost healing about this for the viewer (if an edgy stand-up comic can let himself feel these things so can I) it provides his comedy with a built-in suspense: We’re always waiting for the punch, for the reversal of tone and content that lurks. It creates the best of both worlds: the humane and satirical, the real and sublime.

So when his most recent Netflix special The Closer arrived—not so much by way of Netflix itself as by the hype around his take on the trans community—I knew how to respond.

The infamous(?) Netflix special

I would ignore the conversation altogether, wait to watch and then do so, as much as possible, with an open mind. (The other moral challenge of the hype machine is it tramples on our basic need to think.)

So here are a few takeaways:

Virtually every bit of hype around this special focused on Chappelle’s comments on the trans community. Coverage seemed to suggest there was controversy around this. Just thinking for myself here I have to be frank: there is zero reason for controversy in Chappelle’s comments.

He simply doesn’t agree with the agenda and the manners (or often lack thereof) of the so-called community. That’s not controversy; that’s simply a point of view.

It is high time that any kerfuffle stemming from Chappelle’s comments, or comments of opposition like this in other genres, be greeted with a skepticism. An onus lies with the offended to make their case, not with the allegedly offensive to have to defend theirs. ^[4]A brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was himself controversial, was that he made religion, which for nearly 2,000 years had made a killing (literally) out of taking offense, the thing that was … Continue reading

In fact, if I listen carefully to Chappelle’s comments it’s hard to really garner a point—other than that he, like so many of us, is tired of the machinations of an identity politics movement that feigns kindness but readily engages the world with an utter lack of it. It’s a movement that professes to be victimized by cruelty only to self-righteously inflict it, often through a most toxic medium, on others.

There’s nothing “transphobic” about Chappelle’s position here, just as there’s nothing transphobic about believing that gender is matter of biology. “Every human being in this room,” he says, “every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth.”

Is it funny?

Finally, we do well when we ask the most basic questions available. These are often hidden from us by societal anxieties and agendas (two things often closely related). And of this special the most basic question we can ask—amid the hype via controversy—is “Is it funny?”

I have my answer. I’ll let others come to theirs on their own.