I find myself startled by some of this reaction. I loved
Chappelle’s Show, which ran from 2003 to 2006, but here’s a typical punch line from one of its most beloved recurring segments, “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories”: “*****es, come over here and show Charlie Murphy your titties!” And here’s another: “*****, come over here and have sex with Charlie Murphy.” Was this what Jones had been rooting for? Did none of the recent critics of
The Closer notice the way Chappelle has always talked about *****es—sorry,
women? And yet that tone never stopped me from enjoying his comedy—or acknowledging that his jokes about white women came from his perspective as a Black American man. The suggestion seems to be that women, and in particular white women, are numerous and powerful enough to absorb a comedian’s casual hostility, while gay and, especially, trans people are not. But if there was a meeting where this was decided, no one invited me. Does Dave Chappelle’s attitude toward women offend me? Yes, to the extent that, if asked, I will say, “Dave Chappelle’s attitude toward women offends me. It’s a shame because he’s a good comic.” But there’s no need to upgrade that to “Dave Chappelle’s attitude toward women is so dangerous that his work ought to be suppressed and anyone connected to it should be shunned.”
...
Chappelle’s work offers us similar contradictions, and a similar Rorschach test. Is the story here “rich comedian attacks marginalized community” or “Black comedian attacks elite consensus”? That’s why
The Closer is structured as a series of dares.
Does this joke bother you? What about this one? Early on, the audience bridles a little at a joke about the Chinese origins of the coronavirus. Chappelle soon warns that it’s only going to get worse. Running through the culture war’s greatest hits, he dares critics to take unequal offense, and prove his point about a hierarchy of suffering.
And of course, some critics walked straight into the trap. The negative reaction to
The Closer has revolved largely around what he says about LGBTQ people. Chappelle has always been clear about the political argument he is making with this material: In a few short years, gay- and trans-rights activism has achieved the kind of cultural veto that Black Americans have failed to win through decades of struggle. In Chappelle’s telling, no other movement has such power. The rapper DaBaby, censured for
remarks about AIDS, was
once involved in the fatal shooting of a Black man at a Walmart. (He was not charged in the death but was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon.) “Nothing bad happened to his career,” Chappelle says. “Do you see where I’m going with this?” In the United States, he says, you can shoot and kill a Black person, “but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.” And no other movement, Chappelle maintains, has been granted such immunity to criticism. Bashing feminists for their privilege is so common that I’m surprised Chappelle’s jokes about “white *****es get[ting] tear-gassed” during the Women’s March didn’t
land him a book deal. The implicit hierarchy of suffering is also the point of his
“space Jews” jokes, which rely on an anti-Semitic trope—Holocaust inversion, in which the oppressed people are reincarnated as the oppressor.
The Closer is Dave Chappelle pushing
all of our buttons, and inviting us to reflect on which ones provoke a reaction.
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But I like that puzzle. Don’t you? We can’t say who the Bad Art Friend is, and we shouldn’t try to resolve
The Closer into a simple story of victim and bully. First, because that appears to be the frame Chappelle wants, a funny guy defying the morality police, and the morality police will never win when they’re wagging fingers while he is making jokes. But also because any attempt to reduce the Chappelle story to a wealthy comedian attacking a marginalized community
has to consider the show’s final section, which highlights the hypocrisy of those same critics. The story of Daphne Dorman, a trans woman who defended Chappelle online after the backlash to
Sticks and Stones, ends with her being dragged on Twitter and her death by suicide. (Though Chappelle acknowledges that he doesn’t know what else was happening in her life, he insinuates a connection. “I bet dragging her didn’t help,” he says.) The special ends with Chappelle saying that Dorman was part of the same minority group as him: “my people”—comedians. He’s had enough of the “punching down.”
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The story of Dorman, as presented in
The Closer, is a brutal indictment of social-justice activism on the internet. If Chappelle’s comedy is “
dangerous” because it could lead to real-world harm, then what the hell is the word for what happened to Dorman? After the latest special began airing, Dorman’s family supported Chappelle. “Daphne was in awe of Dave’s graciousness,” one of her sisters told
The Daily Beast. “She did not find his jokes rude, crude, off-coloring, off-putting, anything. She thought his jokes were funny.”
And there’s the Rorschach test. Are Dave Chappelle’s jokes offensive, or are they funny? They’re both. Is he attacking a marginalized community, or a cabal of sadistic scolds? Both. People can be
both. Chappelle is entirely right to indict would-be censors for their wild inconsistencies and their capricious attitude to offense. As a comedian, he is thrown against the bars of this illogical prison every day. Why are Caitlyn Jenner jokes more obvious grounds for cancellation than ones about white *****es getting tear-gassed? When is Dave Chappelle a Black comedian and when is he a rich comedian? Sometimes the ink blot won’t resolve into a neat outline. It remains, like life, a mess.
