Fine, I Guess I’m Gonna Say Something About Dave Chappelle Now. Goddammit. (Patreon)

I wasn’t going to say anything.

I really wasn’t.

I have a crushing deadline, and a toddler, and just a whole lot of things going on. And after the last special, frankly, I just didn’t want to deal with the inevitable Twitter scream-a-thon about it if I did say something, pretty much no matter what it was I actually said.

But this fucking story just keeps going on and on and on, and the DiScOuRsE around it has gotten weirder and weirder and meaner and meaner, and hey, look at this pretty Patreon I got where folks who yell IT’S JUST JOKES, SNOWFLAKE all day in lieu of breathing or working or experiencing human life in all its infinite variation are not going to come huff and puff and blow my Chuckle Factory down.

Because of all those brick wall I got there for comedians to perform in front of, get it?

So I’m gonna say something. About comedy, and writing, and getting offended, and the arc of a career, and punching down, and free speech, and maybe even a little bit about the inherent benefit of not using art to be a dick to people. This isn't the media review, I'm happily writing about Farscape in another window. This is the craft and writing culture essay, and it's REAL MAD.

The thing is, a controlling stake in the huffing and puffing about Dave Chappelle getting $25 million to yell “I’m Team TERF” at a room full of almost certainly mostly cis people and then get very upset indeed when it wasn’t universally received as the distilled wisdom of heaven borne to us all on a golden platter hoisted ever-so-humbly by the greatest comedian of all time, tends to start off, and continue with, a couple of really fucking dusty arguments. And I believe I am in an excellent position to squoosh them under my very fetching heels.

The arguments, before people just dissolve into a puddle shrieking about how much they love offensive comedy so everyone else needs to lighten up, go like this:

1. You didn’t watch the special, so you don’t get to have an opinion.

2. You’re an easily offended snowflake who doesn’t like, or know anything about, stand-up comedy, so of course you don’t get it.

3. If you don’t clap every time a comedian says horrible shit about vulnerable populations, free speech will die, democracy itself will crumble, and in the terrifying new Reign of the SJW, comedy will be outlawed and no one will ever laugh again. Humanity’s soul depends upon Dave Chappelle being rewarded handsomely for denying the personhood of trans people.

COOL.

Look.

First of all, don’t fucking worry, Guardians of Comedy, I watched the special. The whole thing. And I watched all his other Netflix specials too. Start to finish. Was this a good use of my frighteningly finite time in this world which has so much beauty to offer?

Perhaps not.

But I watched the fucking thing.

Second, anyone who knows me in real life (and a fair few who pay close attention online, know that I am a huge fan of stand-up comedy. It’s honestly kind of gross. I don’t pretend it isn’t…odd. I just understand this is a thing about myself that most of my friends don’t get, and I can’t really explain, but is still an important part of my (bleeding, obviously) heart.

Seeing stand-up is one of my biggest pleasures in life. That in and of itself is pretty middle-of-the-road, WE ALL LIKE TA LAFF DON’T WE? But where I get scruffy is…I don’t even necessarily want to go see big names. I kind of don’t even want to see big names. My love is pure. It’s not for any one comic. Most stand-up freaks like me can list their top 5 for you no problem, and they will, especially if you didn’t ask and already said you hate stand-up earlier in the date.  But my obsession is with comedy, not stars. I want the craft, I’m not too fussed about the bright lights.

And past a certain point, most (#notalllegends) big names get a lot less craft-y, a lot less #relatable, and their ticket prices are too high for me to be that enthused about sitting through Lifestyles of the Rich and Hilarious.

Nah. My ideal night (I would, no lie, do it every night if I could) is getting spicy noodles then hitting a club where there will be 17 comics and I’ve heard of none of them.

Does that mean I’ve seen a lot of bad comedy?

Oh my god, you have sheerly no idea.

I’ve seen a dude do five straight minutes on how much he wants to rape Scarlett Johanssen. Yeah, that happened. And was it at the Guffaw Garage in Antivaxx Junction, North Dakota? No it was not, my friends, it was at the goddamn Comedy Cellar in New York City. The famous one. The actual. I have listened politely to a 70+ postal worker tell 100% jokes about envelopes and walking for ten minutes while nobody stopped him. I watched an Australian Christian girl to whom nothing more negative than the content of your average episode of The Wiggles has ever happened cheerfully tell us swearing is bad and also draw pictures for an hour. I sat in a pub in Ireland watching two Americans and a Canadian literally make Lucky Charms and Irish Car Bomb jokes to a room so hostile it could have turned into an international incident at any moment. And I paid EUROS for that.

Reader, I have handed over real human money, on purpose, to see amateur Maine comedians do open mics. More than once. More than three times. Once, I paid ten entirely non-counterfeit dollars to see a Peaks Island comedian. And I didn’t like her on the island.

And that’s just what I’ve seen in person, which is really only in the last ten years or so, because before I met my husband, wholly no one in my life would go see RANDOM RAW DOG stand-up with me. It doesn’t touch my long term (obviously toxic) relationship with Comedy Central reaching back to the 90s.

Even when they’re awful, and when you prefer randos, they are often awful, offensive, or both, it’s fascinating to think about why they’re awful, exactly where they lost the room, what they could have done to turn it around at varying points. Especially as someone who writes short fiction (which is what a set is, at its core) I always learn something.

And then there’s the thing that so many of my dear ones are afraid of, the thing that keeps them away from comedy clubs far more effectively than any velvet rope.

I’ve no problem admitting I have a scorching case of Resting Bitch Face. Which means that if I am within long-distance calling coverage of a comic’s eyeline, they will usually zero in on me for some crowdwork and/or roasting if I’m not mid-heart attack due to laughter.

Unfortunately for me, crowdwork usually goes:

3. What’s your name?

2. Where are you from/are you local?

1. What do you do for a living?

And y’all, what I do for a living is EMINENTLY mockable. Because if I say I’m a writer, they see material. The next question is always what do you write? And then I’m screwed, because HA HA GEEK LOL. So if they get to what’s your job within three questions, and they always do, I’m gonna be the butt of jokes for the rest of the night. Even better if I’m not in America and thus, the minute I open my mouth I’m clearly a very roastable, but more importantly, safely roastable, nationality. Everyone loves an American to point at! It’s fun for the whole planet!

Point is, I’ve taken some real scorching shit from some big names. And a ton of small ones. Hell, Sean Hughes lit me up so hard he fucking died six months later.

And I think he’d like that joke, I really do. Despite being so incensed by my existence at his show that he felt the need to call me fat on Twitter afterward.

I say all this to point out that despite being a big, and yes, fat, feminist terminally online SJW expert in scowling, it’s actually quite hard to offend me with comedy. My skin is like a koopa shell. Not only have I sat through objectively just politically radioactive sets, but I have been insulted, directly, by name, using specifics, by comics I respect, and walked away with a smile. You can’t hurt me with jokes, man, I know the game, I paid my ticket price, I’m fine with it.

And what’s more, I’ve been a massive fan of Dave Chappelle since the goddamned 90s.

Because all that live stand-up love is a tiny lonely bug in a rainstorm next to my history with televised stand-up. It’s not just Chappelle. I knew who Dave was long before the Chappelle show because I spent my entire teens and twenties hooked up to an IV of Comedy Central specials and variety hours and Dr. Katz Professional Therapist episodes and everything else that channel was willing to shove into my veins when it, and I, were both babies. The comedian class Chappelle is part of is wall-to-wall legends, and I was gobbling up their material when Margaret Cho was still doing it all in pleather catsuits and Marc Maron had never even heard the word podcast, because it hadn’t been invented yet.

And each and every one of these guys had jokes I didn’t like, found shitty and insulting, punched down, punched sideways, aged like milk, the whole gamut of throwing things at the iconic brick wall to see what would outlast the millennium. A whole hot mess of them back then had extremely charming things to say about women, particularly, and despite mostly being one, I was perfectly able to laugh at the rest of their shit and excuse the stuff that stung, because if I couldn’t, I could not possibly have grown up in the 80s and 90s reading any books, watching any movies or TV shows, or interacting with other human beings.

It is HARD to offend me so much I get genuinely upset about it. I’m an artist, too, I get it, not everything works the way you want it to, we all make mistakes. I’ve even, occasionally, been known to write comedy. Even won awards for it. I give humor a long leash. I am certainly among the wokerrati, but I am fully capable of thinking good job, dingus, try not saying that shit next time, it’s better for your skin, and still seeing value in the rest of their work.

Welp. Dave Chappelle finally managed to offend me with his terrible special.

And it is terrible. I’ve spent all this time giving you my bona fides so you can rest somewhat assured that this is, in fact, my bag, baby, and I don’t just consume ethically-sourced green tea and Hannah Gadsby specials. I love Dave Chappelle, and I watched this horrible mistake on purpose, thinking, foolishly, that he would…you know…do a comedy.

Mostly he offended me by not being funny. At all. At any point. The Closer, form start to finish, is the most fragile snowflake shit I’ve ever seen in my life. It is 90 minutes of someone trying to publicly process how hurt they are that some people didn’t crown their ill-informed thoughts about trans people with the golden circlet of truth without letting anyone know they’re deeply, deeply hurt that youth culture has moved on from where it was when they were a solid half of it.

They. They, they, they. See? It’s not hard.

Ricky Gervais did this too, and it was just as baffling. These men have all the money and clout anyone could dream of, and yet they devote over half their grotesquely overpaid, internationally-carried comedy specials to retroactively owning some random person with 150 followers on Twitter to an audience of millions. Not new, authentic, original material that breaks ground and says something interesting or even occasionally powerful. Just…recounting social media beefs in a room where people have already paid to applaud.

The other Netflix specials had this crap too, and it was boring and cringey then watching a rich dude whine about Twitter not liking his middle-aged hot takes then, but at least it was surrounded by some great material where Dave does what he does best: address social issues through the lens of his personal experience & fantastically dry, natural delivery.

This time it was just…sitting through an hour-long university lecture by that professor who makes everyone uncomfortable by making the subject matter mostly about him.

Dave has always had…uncomfortable jokes about women peppered through the years of his incredibly prolific career. It was never actually that cool for him to spend 25 minutes of one of the previous specials comparing himself to a broke sex-worker being abused by a pimp to explain a contractual dispute involving millions of dollars in which he came out entirely on top. But Dave always gets a pass. From me too, I’m not immune from having overlooked a lot of shit because the other stuff was just so brilliant and necessary.

But this? This just wasn’t actually a comedy special. It was a blog post. A fucking mean blog post. There were very few real jokes. At all. Just complaining that he’s right about trans people and those sensitive meanies are so wrong to critique him. Why in the fuck are we paying these men tens of millions to complain about social media while stacks of other comics are out there actually doing the work? It’s becoming a whole trope, partly because at some point these men’s lives are just inexplicable to the average person, and it’s desperately harder to make immortal comedy out of…how rich and famous they are, how much they have risen above problems that plague the rest of us. Dave begins this special just flat-out saying he’s rich and famous. No joke, just…those words, Elon Musk style.

One of the few times I laughed was about a third of the way in when he just saunters up to the mind-boggling unforced error of the now infamous “I’m Team TERF” line. I laughed in disbelief. I laughed because I knew we were all in for another round of “is Dave a genius or is he just being an asshole because he doesn’t like trans people?” and all the same tired arguments about free speech and how much telling very cruel jokes about people you don’t like the look of is fighting the power, actually, were about to get trotted out, just like they were for each and every one of the four specials he’s chosen to devote to this topic, WHICH IS GETTING PRETTY WEIRD WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

Dave Chappelle’s legacy, up until pretty recently, was utterly carved in golden tablets. One of, if not the, greatest of all time, as he himself was happy to inform us. And it was all deserved. But he chose, actively chose, to devote at least half of each of his “comeback” specials to just dumping on a marginalized group who did nothing to attract his attention beyond exist. This was what was worth coming back for. To say he doesn’t like trans people. What a brilliant and incisive observation that definitely isn’t just…what most middle-aged mainstream people think and say all the time.

Dude, just…why? People are going to remember this. It’s not just going to be GOAT anymore. It’s gonna be GOAT with an asterisk, because a ton of the people watching and discussing this aren’t me, they didn’t grow up watching and loving him and cutting their teeth on Comedy Central’s Bronze Age, this is what they will judge him on, and this sucks.

And it sucked long before he got around to Daphne. Daphne, who he has used as his “trans friend who supports him in email” in at least one previous special to justify his shitty jabs at her community. Daphne, whose suicide he has now chosen to use mainly to redeem and praise himself in a set which ends, along with the whole show, on a line that wholly misgenders her. Almost every aspect of the story, including the implication (wholly unsupported by facts, according to her family) that it was the trans community who drove this woman to suicide, is about him. About how she liked his trans jokes, so they’re ok. How she was a terrible comedian before she met him, and improved after taking his advice. About how she was “one of the good ones” because she laughed at jokes at her expense, as if we all haven’t learned to do that to head off more abuse and cruelty and prejudice, as if Dave doesn’t particularly know how that game goes, since he walked away from his entire career for the same goddamned reason. He makes Daphne’s entire life and death about him and how great she thought he was, then calls her a man to cap off his Netflix deal.

Wow. Honestly. Wow.

I actually kind of almost liked the “Impossible Vagina” joke, and not just because it was actually a joke, for once. Hold on a second, I’ll explain. Because it still wasn’t funny, even if it was an okay joke. It was still mean as hell. But it’s one of those jokes that hits real different coming from a member of the community under discussion than coming from someone outside that community, most especially someone who has a history of being a dick to that community, to put it mildly. I think there’s a strong possibility a trans woman or man getting up there and being a little edgy and talking about their Impossible Genitals would probably bring the house down, since the joke would be that it’s indistinguishable, and how much the patriarchy do love comparing women to meat, rather than what Dave made of it, especially with a trans-majority audience who can relate to all the confusing, strange, euphoric, and upsetting aspects of physical transition. That actually might be edgy, because it would’ve come from the edge, the marginalized, the voices that aren’t often heard. Last time we had to have this conversation, Contrapoints pointed out that there is so much hilarity and weirdness in the trans experience that it’s perfect for comedy—but you have to actually care enough to say something interesting about it, and you can’t do that without knowing anything about it, and Dave Chappelle knows fuck-all about being trans. There was a seed of a good joke there, but it wasn’t his joke to tell, and he should’ve known that.

But the thing that makes all this so upsetting is that Dave has always made his reputation on jokes about the marginalized community he is a part of. He should understand insider jokes vs outsider jokes, because he’s always been the black man who can tell jokes about the black experience that white comics would very rightly be launched into the sun for attempting. Because he knows that experience, intimately, obviously he does, and he can and did change the game by laying out what he knows in the way only he could.

That he can’t see that he’s not doing that when he goes after a group for which he, as a cis man, is in the oppressor-class, that he’s now just doing insult-comedy with a whole demographic as his target, is at best disappointing.

That he can’t seem to imagine black trans folk exist, and frames it all in terms of “having problems with white people” and Caitlyn Jenner, is just fucking sad.

But I think the reason the conversation is a little different is that this simply wasn’t a comedy special, it was a tirade with a target, and Dave would have been first in line to grind a white comic who got up and yelled “I’m Team KKK” into a fine paste. It’s much harder to make the “comedy must be free” argument when comedy left the building before the lights went up.

There was no kind of pushing of any envelope or standing on the edge exploring new vistas—this crap had dust on it decades ago. Why do the free speech warriors only ever come out of the woodwork to defend this hoary old “women and minorities and the gays are so terrible, don’t you all agree?” Borscht-Belt grey-ass humor that all of our grandfathers would be fine with? Why does anyone get $25 million to bray Thanksgiving dinner table unemployed uncle opinions? What art, what freedom, what joy or catharsis or brave new paradigm, does this serve? That humor is so deep in the envelope they’re fucking handwritten letters. This is ancient stuff, it doesn’t need anyone to defend it, and losing it would lose comedy nothing, because they’re just dad jokes with no puns. Your mean, angry, resentful, bitter dad who hates anything he doesn’t understand and makes every festive occasion uncomfortable and depressing.

And now Dad is sticking that asterisk on his own legacy by refusing to see that he is helping people to laugh at trans folk, not with them, knowing that laughter can turn ugly at any moment, exactly the issue he left The Chappelle Show over when it affected him.

Just why? Why is he doing this, if not out of hate? It’s an issue that doesn’t affect him at all. It’s not funny. He doesn’t need online outrage to pay the bills, he’s set for life. So he must think making sure everyone knows he doesn’t think trans women are women, and trans men, presumably, don’t even exist in his mind, is important.

And the only people who think that are transphobes.

Right now, when the world is in such very real trouble and in need of voices to speak truth to power, why can Dave Chappelle ask us, as he did in 2017, to give Donald fucking Trump a chance, but can’t extend that grace to an entire minority under desperate attack? Why is he speaking ignorance to the powerless instead of truth to power?

It’s no sweat off my back if he wants to do all this, though in this age of “eat the rich” it’s pretty weird that $25 million price tag for something with zero artistry (unlike just about everything else he’s done) doesn’t seem to bother any of his defenders. But I don’t have to enjoy not laughing for an hour and a half, and I don’t have to say nothing about it and just quietly “not watch” when talking about culture is half the culture itself.

And the thing is, it’s very much sweat off trans people’s back. Somewhere in there he knows that. He is the GOAT—it gives a pass to others to treat trans folk as invalid and mock them, at a minimum. At maximum? Far worse.

If we mean to defend all this on the basis of “just jokes,” it sure would be nice if there were some actual jokes. I haven’t seen one single person talk about anything but his Team TERF crap. No memes of hilarious lines or moments in the special. Because there aren’t any.

And now, in defending himself, he’s bafflingly said he’d meet with trans people who had issues with his comedy, but only if they admitted Hannah Gadby wasn’t funny.

Well, first of all, congratulations to Hannah Gadsby on her success in the real-estate market, because living rent-free in Dave Chappelle’s head is quite the development deal.

Second of all, what the actual fuck.

Who cares? Why is this suddenly about Hannah Gadsby, who hasn’t had a special out in awhile and…you know…if you were just busting to get up there and not tell jokes because the other stuff you had to say felt more important…why the crap would you be mad at Gadsby for doing that? (Except she actually had kind of a lot of jokes but whatever, that’s the narrative about her from people who, ironically, DIDN’T WATCH IT AND GOT OFFENDED AT A FEW JOKES ABOUT STRAIGHT DUDES. Why is denying Hannah Gadbsy like she’s the LGBTQ Jesus equally important to fully watching his special and pre-arranging a time and place in his list of demands? She’s not even trans! She has nothing to do with this! Does he think she’s trans because she doesn’t look conventionally feminine? Does he think all trans people like her comedy? Did he not hear her bit about taking a joke? Did he really, really not hear her bit about getting the shit beaten out of her for being a butch lesbian whilst including his bit about beating the shit out of a butch lesbian in his tranch of much more highly-paid specials?

If it’s so important for comedy to breathe free with no restraints, why doesn’t that extend to Hannah? Is there a reason besides she’s a woman, and gay, and butch, and she said men weren’t in charge of the value of women? WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH AN AUSTRALIAN LADY WHO LIKES THE SOUND OF A CUP SETTLING INTO A SAUCER? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

The fuck did she do to him? He didn’t want to go after one of the very many racist white male comics still packing arenas? No? Just…the lady in a suit who talked about Picasso one time? Who isn’t even American, nor has ever said much of anything about American comedy or the American experience, black or white, trans or cis?

It also makes me even less inclined to like Dave’s Daphne stories, when he can drag another gender non-conforming woman into his problems just because he doesn’t like her comedy. LGBTQ+ women are not human shields for male comics who can’t keep their hands and feet inside the bus.

The only explanation I can think of is that it’s not so much gay and trans folk that Hannah Gadsby represents to him, but the inkling of an idea that comedy, and younger audiences, might be moving on from the late 90s/early 00s zeitgeist of which that Dave is basically Zeus. That the march of time and culture might be briefly halted if he can somehow get those pesky social media kids to “admit” she isn’t funny and he is.

Because otherwise, that’s just some weird “look over there!” nonsense. Why does he dislike her for doing pretty much exactly what he’s always done: interweave jokes with serious commentary on the issues that affect her demographic?

One of the things I’ve always loved about Chappelle is his total control, of his material, his presence, his pacing, his moments, his audience. It’s fucking masterful. Nobody does it like him, nobody ever has. In his special on George Floyd, he didn’t really tell any jokes either, but you couldn’t take your eyes away, because it was so powerful. And it was powerful because he was speaking HIS truth, HIS experience, HIS pain, HIS anger, and that of his community.

It cannot ever be the same to use that mastery to tear down a community you know nothing about. He doesn’t know the pain and anger of the trans world. He doesn’t care to, but he believes fundamentally in his right to be angry at it, and tell them their truth without listening.

And that’s called privilege. It’s intersectional, and it’s complicated. But it’s still privilege. It isn’t about race, for once. That’s what he lost track of in his whole section on punching down, in which he showed he doesn’t understand the phrase at all. Yeah, him bagging on Caitlyn Jenner is punching up. Because she’s also rich and white. But Black trans men and women exist. It is STILL punching down for a cis comic, of any gender or race, to talk trash about them. Because in this case, Dave is part of the hegemonic subset, not the oppressed one. Caitlyn Jenner, believe it or not, is not actually the only trans woman in the world. It’s what the kids call not a good look for a man who has never struggled with his gender identity using a dead woman to justify telling people who do to sit down and be a lot quieter, for his comfort.

Coming from someone who has been so powerful for so many, that plain sucks.

And in the end, Dave loses nothing except some of the shine off his legacy. He got paid, he will continue to get paid, he is always listened to no matter what he says, he will always be listened to no matter what he says, legions are defending him, and anyone trans even saying they didn’t like someone they admired stating they were the kind of feminist who excluded them is being treated pretty fucking poorly right now. He isn’t being silenced or cancelled, he’s just having to actually hear regular non-critic people responding to his art, which never happened back in the 90s, and he sure seems to hate it. Though not nearly as much as his fans, a whole lot of whom Dave Chappelle is, or at least was, fully aware are white bros who once loved him primarily for allowing them to skirt accountability by saying they were just repeating his jokes. That’s why he left. He knows. But the guy hanging out with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk for funsies seems to have lost touch with what he didn’t like about that audience once upon a time.

This is a lot of words to say the special sucked. But it did. Take all the horrible anti-trans stuff out if you want, and it’s still a TEDx Talk on People Gramps Hates. Not even TED proper. On any kind of qualitative level, no one but him would have even gotten it on the air with such poor content. It was purely an exercise in ego because Dave’s feelings got hurt by the younger generation online no longer worshipping his every word. Happens to the best of Boomers & Xers, but no one is required to snuggle up with grandpa and his fossilized opinions to prove they have a sense of humor.

The Closer is bad comedy. Dave is a once in a generation comic. It was still bad comedy. And he was a bad friend to Daphne by using her to help himself. I doubt she ever got a cut of Netflix's check, you know?

It is, actually, not hard or bad to create comedy that doesn’t actively harm people who are struggling to be accepted as human goddamned beings. The word comedy comes from the Latin com + edo: to eat together. Because in ancient theater, all comedies end with a feast. It's not hard to eat together, to prepare a feast that doesn't have knives in it for just one guest at the table. It's not hard or lame or weak to hold the knives for the landlord who owns the table and charges extra for the cloth. Comedy is not less funny if it doesn’t hurt someone. It’s definitely not less funny if it only hurts the powerful and unfeeling.

Dave Chappelle used to be the one who made people understand that. It’s fucking tragic, and horribly ironic, that he has used his power to do to others exactly what he has hated all his life.

Also, Hannah Gadsby is funny.