You know what happens [when you get older]? Your circle of concern tightens. I have four nephews. I don’t love any of them.
-Louis C.K.
Throughout our youth, we’re naturally exposed to a wider variety of people and experiences. Each new person is potentially a type of person we’ve never met before, and when we’re young we usually don’t have a choice to say “Nah, I’ll pass”—we just have to recalibrate our worldviews on the fly to incorporate this new thing or person, and even if we don’t understand them, we learn how to empathize with them.
As we get older, we become more selective about new things and new people. We’re still capable of adapting to the world around us, but we also have a pretty good idea of our place in it, so we set out constructing the world we want to live in. The world that suits us. The older we get, the more comfortable we get, and the easier it is to stay within the boundaries of our little worlds.
But an unintended consequence of building our worlds solely for us is that eventually, new things no longer make it past our defenses on their own—we have to go out there and meet them. If we don’t make that effort, our ability to adapt to new things steadily wanes, until eventually we start expecting things in the world to behave the same way as they do in our world. In the process, we can lose our capacity for empathy: we don’t want to understand anything or anybody that doesn’t abide by the rules of our little worlds. We just want them out.
Comedians are supposed to be different. Venturing beyond their comfort zones is part of the job. Being in uncomfortable or unexpected situations helps a comic develop new material, figure out unique ways to look at things, find common threads that connect disparate groups of people. Maybe that’s why I love standup so much: when it's done right, it doesn’t more than just make me laugh. It reminds me to keep an open mind about new things, to look at them from angles I might otherwise not have considered.
The best comics all go above and beyond in finding unique, unexpected, and (above all) funny perspectives on familiar topics. If you asked comedians and comedy fans to list the best comics of all time, the following names would be the consensus picks: Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Bill Hicks, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Ricky Gervais, Joan Rivers, Don Rickles, Steve Martin, and Andy Kaufman. The one unifying characteristic that all of these comics share is an especially unique perspective on things. If an argument has a Side A and a Side B, a decent comic can make jokes about both sides, but the all-time great comics know how to find the Side C that makes everyone laugh.
The greatest comedians can do a lot more than just make us laugh, though—they can also make us think. Their act resonates on a deeper, more meaningful level; they can articulate our collective humanity in ways we often cannot. Sometimes their work even puts into words the feelings and emotions we didn’t even realize we had. Unlike most comics, a great comic’s set isn’t over when the last bit of applause dies down; it burrows its way into your subconscious, where it joins the collection of experiences and moments that form the lens through which we examine things. Great comedians can influence the way we view and interact with the world. But what happens when they start to get old and form little worlds of their own?
Plenty of older comedians have issued dire warnings about the dangers of political correctness and cancel culture in recent years. Jerry Seinfeld recently said he won’t play college campuses because “They’re so PC. They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist’; ‘That’s sexist’; ‘That’s prejudiced.’ They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” Ricky Gervais loves harping on trans people and gender identity and, not too long ago, seriously tried to argue that trans people are simply “men [finding] a new cunning way to dominate and demonise an entire sex.” Chris Rock has railed against cancel culture. Dana Carvey’s most recent special was called Straight White Male, 60, which I’m sure is a joke about how that’s the most offensive thing a person can be these days! or something. When SNL rescinded their job offer to comedian Shane Gillis after video surfaced of Gillis calling Chinese people “chinks” onstage, Rob Schneider blamed the “era of culture unforgiveness [sic].” Tim Allen thinks the “thought police” have made it impossible for comics to make jokes.
What’s interesting is that comedians generally believe that no subject should be off-limits and that any topic can be funny if it’s approached from the correct angle. Part of the thrill of stand-up comedy—for audience and performer alike—is the tightrope act of dissecting an objectively unfunny topic in an effort to find the humor in it. And the darker the subject matter, the more the comedian must draw on their own empathy to ensure the joke is aimed in the right direction. When they do it right, you get Louis C.K. at his peak…
…and when they don’t, lately, you get Dave Chappelle.
The Closer, the final installment in Chappelle’s six-special, $120 million deal with Netflix, came out on October 5th, and it felt like it had a lot riding on it. His first special The Age of Spin was just okay, and Deep in the Heart of Texas and Sticks & Stones were both poorly-received and generated significant backlash for their generous helping of homophobic and transphobic jokes. Deep in the Heart of Texas offered the profoundly weird experience of watching Dave Chappelle fail to come up with a unique perspective on something, but what surprised me more than the hacky, open-mic quality of his jokes about trans people was how callous they were. In fact, when his third and fourth specials (Equanimity and The Bird Revelation) were released, I hesitated to watch them. That’s how bad Deep in the Heart of Texas was: it made me consider giving up on Dave Chappelle, a comic I’ve admired since I discovered stand-up comedy over 20 years ago.
Fortunately, Equanimity and The Bird Revelation both turned out to be very good—The Bird Revelation is one of Chappelle’s best specials ever, in my opinion—and it’s probably not a coincidence that Chappelle dialed the LGBTQ commentary wayyyy down for both specials. For a brief moment, I thought he’d learned from his mistakes, but then he got right back on his bullshit with Sticks & Stones.
The LGBTQ jokes in Sticks & Stones weren’t quite as bad as the ones in Texas, but that’s not a difficult bar to clear, and they were still plenty vitriolic. It’s one thing when a fledgling comic makes a well-intentioned effort to find humor in a tricky subject and just can’t stick the landing, but Dave Chappelle has been doing comedy for 30 years. And besides, these jokes weren’t from some grainy cellphone video of him working out new material at Caroline’s; they were in his special. They were the finished product, so God knows what jokes didn’t make the cut. Chappelle knows how to talk about sensitive subjects without punching down, as evidenced by the fact that he’s done it roughly a million times before. And he also knows how to construct jokes that are very clearly on a specific individual or group. Even to a heterosexual, cisgender bystander like me, Chappelle’s recent LGBTQ material feels gratuitous and exceptionally mean-spirited. Most of his jokes are measured and nuanced, but in Texas and Sticks & Stones, it seemed like his comedic instincts were being clouded by what often feels like an intense personal dislike for LGBTQ people.
The comedy nerd in me hoped that The Closer would turn out to be a conceptual masterpiece, the punchline that Chappelle spent five specials setting up. Everything would fit together, and all his cruel jokes about trans people and his palpable disdain for the LGBTQ community would be revealed to have been part of the setup, a necessary element of his meta-comic masterstroke. You’d think I would have learned something from the last time I put my faith in a comedian, but alas, I did not.
“I come tonight in peace, and I hope to negotiate the release of DaBaby.”
In The Closer, Chappelle wastes no time making it clear that not only has he not learned anything from the backlash to Deep in the Heart of Texas and Sticks & Stones, but in fact, he sees himself as the victim in all this. He opens The Closer by commenting on the “sad story” of DaBaby, a rapper who recently came under fire after he interrupted his own show to deliver an impromptu and intensely homophobic rant about gay people “sucking dick in the parking lot.” (A “sad story” indeed, but not for the reasons Chappelle thinks.)
Chappelle’s take is that DaBaby “punched the LGBTQ community right in the AIDS,” which, even if it wasn’t wildly offensive, would still be a piss-poor joke because it’s not funny. It’s lowbrow and lazy, the same dusty old garbage you’d expect to hear from the shock jocks over at 100.3 FM’s The Morning Show with Muffman and Dirt, Peoria’s #1 Drive-Time Zoo Crew. There’s no point in recapping all of the LGBTQ material in The Closer, because it all hews closely to the same blueprint he’s been following for the past few years. First he says something homophobic or transphobic, people get justifiably upset, and then it’s The gays are mad at me again! It’s ridiculous! All I said was [repeats previous homophobic/transphobic joke]! Look, [vague non-apology], but [new joke insulting LGBTQ people that somehow becomes about racism].
Here’s how the rest of his bit about DaBaby played out:
The kid made a very egregious mistake, I’ll acknowledge that. But the LGBTQ community doesn’t know DaBaby’s history. He’s a wild guy. He once shot a nigga and killed him in Wal-Mart [and] nothin’ bad happened to his career. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Nowhere good, I bet. Also, DaBaby is 29 years old—I don’t know the exact age when someone stops being a “kid,” but I’m pretty sure it’s not one and a half years after the average NFL player has retired.
In our country you can shoot and kill a nigga, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings. And this is precisely the disparity that I wish to discuss.
You think I hate gay people, [but] what you’re really seeing is that I am jealous of gay people. We blacks, we look at the gay community and we go ‘goddamn, look at how well that movement is going!’ […] I can’t help but feel like if slaves had baby oil and booty shorts, we might’ve been free a hundred years sooner.
Does Chappelle have a point that black people in America have had to fight for equality and to be treated with basic human dignity every step of the way, and that the fight is still ongoing? Of course, but very few people would argue otherwise, and the LGBTQ community sure as hell isn’t among them.
Chappelle contends that LGBTQ people are less culturally or socially maligned than black people, yet his jokes about them material received multiple big laughs and applause breaks. If a non-black comic got on stage, said the kind of shit about black people that Chappelle routinely says about gay and trans people, and tossed off a bunch of stereotypes in the process, they’d be rightly eviscerated for it, and Dave Chappelle would be one of the first lining up to take a shot.
So what the hell is going on? How is it that one man can make a career out of skewering prejudicial attitudes with respect to one marginalized group, yet be so eager to participate in the further marginalization of another group? How do you align yourself with billionaire white lady J.K. Rowling (who named an Asian character Cho Chang) and not the people who are constantly under attack by Rowling and her army of TERF freaks, to say nothing of lawmakers across the country?
When the fuck did Dave Chappelle start doing bigots’ work for them?
In 2003, Dave Chappelle quit Chappelle’s Show. It must have been an incredibly difficult decision: the show was a cultural phenomenon, the fruit of 10 years of Chappelle’s labor. In an interview with David Letterman, Chappelle said that part of the reason he decided to walk away from his own show was his growing concern that audiences were laughing not because he was skewering racial stereotypes, but at the stereotypes themselves. He wanted people to laugh with him, not at him, and when he could no longer tell the difference, he left. He walked away from $50 million the moment he even sensed that his comedy was being distorted and co-opted by the very people the jokes were supposed to be about.
The Closer is being hailed by right-wingers as a breath of fresh air and a much-needed dose of “common sense.” But Chappelle isn’t freeing comedians from the “slavery of political correctness,” as Damon Wayans put it when, remarkably, he was asked to share his opinion. He’s just perpetuating the same tired stereotypes and well-worn tropes about gay and trans people that conservative talking heads have been pushing for decades. In doing so, he is gleefully participating in the further demonization of an already-marginalized group of people. He’s become a useful sock puppet for the same right-wingers who no doubt wanted Chappelle’s Show canceled back when it was on the air.
What makes Chappelle’s jokes about LGBTQ people so jarring is that it didn’t have to be this way. George Carlin managed to make fun of PC culture without punching down or alienating his audience. Steve Martin never had to worry about being canceled. Don Rickles actively insulted his audience, but he was equally mean to everybody; he didn’t single out one particular group for special treatment. Louis C.K. had to navigate the same treacherous waters as every other comedian and pushed far more boundaries in the process, but it wasn’t his material that got him cancelled, it was the fact that he was a serial sexual predator. Robin Williams didn’t have to apologize for making discriminatory jokes because he never made them. Katt Williams (no relation) recently pushed back on the very notion of cancel culture:
People weren’t all that funny back when they could say whatever they wanted to say. I don’t know what people got cancelled that we wish we had back. Who are they?
[Cancellation] is done for the reasons it’s done for and it helped who it helped. If all that’s going to happen is that we have to be more sensitive in the way that we talk, isn’t that what we want anyway? Your job as a comedian is to please the most amount of people with your art. [...] If these are the confines that keep you from doing the craft God put you to, then it probably ain’t for you.
Getting older doesn’t mean you automatically lose your ability to empathize with other people, it just means you have to make more of an effort to understand them. Plenty of comedians have made that effort and figured out how to tell jokes without causing active harm to vulnerable people; that Dave Chappelle turned out not to be one of them is not the fault of the LGBTQ community, or cancel culture, or political correctness. It’s his. I don’t know, maybe it was inevitable that Chappelle’s comedy would take on a reactionary bent once he reached a certain age and net worth.
Or maybe Dave Chappelle just isn’t as special as we thought.