Dave Chappelle (Still) Needs to Work on His Transphobia


In Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, we see a star dimming his own light.

 
 
As a mega-fan of Dave Chappelle’s since college, his latest special was difficult to watch. I had held out hope (naively, it turns out) that he would use his Netflix farewell to make some sort of amends for using his vast platform at the regular expense of the LGBT community. What I saw instead was an all too familiar routine patterned after male celebrities unable to respond with maturity to valid criticism. For more than an hour, he doubled down on his past comments and waved his anti-trans flag around with more glee than ever, vanquishing any lingering doubts as to the status of his allyship. In truth, it felt less like a stand-up act than an hour-long apologia for his obsessive preoccupation with trans-antagonistic humor.

To say it fell totally flat is the most generous way of putting it, while ‘dreadfully predictable and cruel’ is more apt. Some might say he proved himself an accomplice to hate with his previous specials, but this one solidified it, with Chappelle even going so far as to close out his set by casually misgendering a dead trans woman — multiple times, just in case we chalked up the first one to a stray slip-up. This is no longer the Dave we grew to love with Killin’ Them Softly. His evolution from sharp social commentator to anti-PC curmudgeon has been terrible to witness in the way it’s always terrible when raw talent is wasted like this. As I say below, I will always believe in the possibility of redemption, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely after his latest salvo.

I’m reproducing here two more fleshed out reactions I shared on social media after watching Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix installment, The Closer.

(1) I’m curious how many others felt the same, but I just didn’t find it particularly funny? Even apart from the LGBT brickbats I’ll get into below. I laughed maybe twice during its 72-minute runtime. In terms of actual comedic content, it was overall pretty poor in both quality and quantity. And the few bits I did enjoy pale in comparison to most of his previous work. Which is to say, if you don’t consider a handful of laughs too much to ask for when watching a stand-up act, you might want to sit this one out. Those jonesing for some classic Dave are better off re-watching Killin’ Them Softly instead.

(2) Chappelle’s fixation with trans people, and trans women in particular, is genuinely a weird thing, notwithstanding the pain and damage his ignorance has inflicted on this community. He’s had this hang-up for virtually his whole career and I just don’t get how he’s made so little progress (if any). Much as he tries to conflate them throughout this special, his self-confessed transphobia and any perceived disparity in power between the movements for Black and LGBT justice are entirely separate issues. He needs to work on his transphobia, regardless of the latter. His “jealousy” of the brisk gains he sees in the LGBT domain doesn’t somehow negate his decadeslong history of transphobic commentary — not in the least. Nor is his ‘I had one trans friend who liked me’ in any way different from white people’s ‘I have a black friend’ defense. Same song, different verse. How could someone so seemingly intelligent commit this many unforced errors?

He was making these same jokes about AIDS and trans genitalia 16 years ago. They weren’t funny then and they still aren’t today. (At least in his early days, these amounted to side plots rather than the focal point.) The key difference now is that his targeted hate has wider reach and therefore hurts more people. And for the record, there is no conceivable universe in which threatening to kill a woman and throw them in the trunk of your car makes for a laughworthy bit in 2021 — unless, apparently, you’re comedy’s “G.O.A.T,” a title he claims for himself in this special.

“But it’s just jokes,” Chappelle stans retort, as if comedy is somehow immune to the same social pressures that guide behavior and conduct in every other societal domain. Except the way in which Chappelle speaks on these topics here is artless. In fact, much of his routine is neither comedic in tone nor laid out in the form of a traditional joke. “Gender is a fact,” he asserts, stone-faced, as if the case for this view makes itself. In case it isn’t obvious, that’s not a punch line, it’s straight hate speech — the kind that helps keep the lights on at NewsMax and Breitbart. If you’d take issue with a politician or talking head spouting this on Fox News, you should have a problem with Dave Chappelle doing the same in a Netflix special. And if you’d object to someone saying that being gay is a choice but not with Chappelle’s equally bigoted remarks that seek to erase any distinction between sex and gender, you might have a blind spot when it comes to trans people.

For his part, Chappelle seems positively mystified that the ubiquity of the internet could in turn mean more and stronger blowback from certain quarters, namely from LGBT activists and those whose generously salted wounds he insists on reopening. In what may have been the corniest joke of the night, Chappelle feebly attempts to shut down his most vocal critics dragging him online by declaring that “Twitter’s not a real place.” Only a deeply out of touch has-been could make a lousy one-liner like this while discounting the raw influence of the internet in today’s media landscape. As others have pointed out, Chappelle also completely contradicts himself later on when he suggests that it was Twitter attacks that led to his late friend, trans comedienne Daphne Dorman, to take her own life.

Honestly, what I saw last night was no different from the behavior we’ve observed from any number of other male figures who’ve come under fire for bigoted comments. It’s so boringly predictable — like a subroutine for contrarian celebrities. Whenever men of power are faced with backlash, they double down and, like a dog with a bone, refuse to let it go or thoughtfully reflect on the source of that backlash. Chappelle spent nearly the entire special on this singular topic, chasing his tail as he flitted from one ill-conceived argument to another, trying desperately to justify his bigotry and convince his detractors that he’s actually not the guy he continues to show us he is. What was painfully clear by the end is that he has no serious answer to the “punching down” critique that’s landed him in hot water over the years. If anything, his crude, relentless volley of lazy punchlines against the trans community here only served to validate his critics.

This is such a strange and sad saga because for whatever else you might say about Chappelle, he’s objectively a talented comic. Imagine getting twenty million dollars from Netflix to talk about anything in the world and you choose to do…this? Why? Does Dave have no other fun stories or insights from his globetrotting life? Any droll yet poignant commentary drawn from living through a pandemic? I’m certain he does. But instead he chose to dedicate the entirety of his Netflix finale to engaging in trans-exclusionary apologetics and bashing the easiest target since Donald Trump: “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” What a snooze. Not only is this unbefitting for a comic of his caliber, he’s far too smart to have misnavigated this debate in good faith, and without understanding the consequences. Dude knows full well what he’s doing and who he’s hurting, but when have powerful men ever let a little thing like that stand in the way of their ego?

As a friend cautioned on Facebook earlier this week, regardless of the position you take on the guy’s comedy, if you’re going to defend Chappelle, you HAVE to do it with scrutiny and attention to detail. You can’t do it blindly because it too easily invalidates the pain that he’s caused.

Given the new legacy Chappelle’s diligently created for himself and his unwillingness to make amends, this care should be top of mind wherever discussions of his work arise. I don’t much care whether he’s “canceled,” as I know that would never happen anyway. But any comic whose working definition of “edgy” is riffing on trans women and catering to anti-woke populism is as unimaginative as they are callous. While I remain firm in the belief that anyone is capable of redemption, Chappelle only makes the climb more treacherous each time he steps onto the stage. In the meantime, there are countless other stand-up acts perfectly capable of telling jokes without being an asshole.

P.S. Now is as good a time as any to donate to LGBT charities, like The Trevor Project and Human Dignity Trust.

 

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