Dave Chappelle the Comedy Relic

Dave Chappelle in The Closer. Photo: Netflix

I teach a college course on African American comedy about every year where we use literary and cultural-studies theories to address the public and political significance of African American satire and comedy from the 19th century to the present. The class is centered on analyzing film, goggle box, literature, and stand-up comedy. With the release of The Closer, Dave Chappelle has been a specially unavoidable figure this term.

Nigh of my students were born after the release of Chappelle'southward 2000 special Killin' Them Softly and were in preschool when his follow-up, For What Information technology's Worth, premiered 4 years later. When I introduce them to his early fabric, they are often surprised and impressed — past his ability to dial upward, to speak truth to power, to focus his "attacks" on injustices and institutions with discernibly more ability than he had. Likewise, he'south just funny. It's Chappelle's ability to answer to the realities of that time — to racism, sexism, policing, government mismanagement — with humor and precision that captivates them now like it captivated comedy audiences 20 years ago.

We analyze in Killin' Them Softly, for example, Chappelle's clear articulation of racism and white privilege when it comes to policing. He tells a story well-nigh a white friend who gets pulled over past the constabulary while drunk, high, and driving erratically and is released afterward explaining, "Sorry, officer. I … I didn't know I couldn't do that." Students are always peculiarly fatigued to Chappelle's discussion of racial stereotypes. In this aforementioned special, he recounts the fourth dimension a eating place employee correctly guessed he was going to order chicken. "All these years, I idea I liked chicken because information technology was delicious. Turns out, I'm genetically predisposed to liking chicken!" He returns to this thought four years after in For What It's Worth, explaining, "Simply 'cause I swallow craven and watermelon, they remember there's something wrong with me. If you don't similar craven and watermelon, something is wrong with you, motherfucker!" This is Chappelle at his all-time: Acknowledging everyday racism in the lives of Black people, revealing its absurdity without making light of the targets of such racism. These examples, even 20 years later, still hold their significance.

Just what I've noticed in the past few years is that students are finding Chappelle less and less relevant. And this isn't an inevitability due to his age; stand-ups older than Chappelle — comics similar Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, Marc Maron, and Paul F. Tompkins — continue to resonate with younger fans. To my generation, watching Chappelle's early on-2000s specials felt like we were seeing someone plow into one of the greats in real time. To my students' generation, those specials are relics. To them, he is the Chappelle of 2021 — The Closer Chappelle. A man who's so consumed with yelling at people on the net that he forgot to be funny. What could be dismissed past longtime fans as a misstep is existence considered past younger audiences as his modus operandi. Indeed, the majority of Chappelle's stand up-up archive — what the public volition accept available to them to view and review — has been produced postal service-2016. The comedian he is now is the comedian he's been most.

I've taught Chappelle in one context or another for the past ten years, but teaching him in the by five years has felt different. To younger audiences, he is out of stride not only with the comedy of the moment just with the zeitgeist in full general. He claims that he takes aim at anybody but focuses with laser precision on the most marginalized groups, specifically groups that push back on his work. He goes so far as to say that accusations that he's now "punching downward" — specially at trans women — are his least favorite: "Punching downward? What the fuck does that hateful?" When I talk near punching down with my students, nosotros talk about the negative tension created when a comedian with a certain amount of power targets someone with less. We talk about why we are disturbed past a rich, cisgender, heterosexual man making jokes about trans women. (A person who might criticize this every bit college-campus chatter might also think that Chappelle has always been ubiquitous on campuses, in dorm rooms on Chappelle's Evidence and on campus-one-act tours.)

But, of course, Chappelle knows exactly what "punching down" means, considering he uses the question every bit a segue into a transphobic tirade in The Closer. What he'due south really asking is: How can he punch downwardly? In teaching Chappelle, it's become increasingly important to address how a person tin exist marginalized while also marginalizing others. Comedy has often served equally a defense mechanism or a survival tactic; it'south a way to take aim at a world that would destroy you otherwise, to clear your selfhood when the globe denies information technology. When you are used to having to chip for a position as a comedian, information technology'southward possible that when you're finally empowered, you're still so used to scrapping that you're unwieldy. You might make mistakes. You might dial down.

Chappelle has said in previous acts and repeats in The Closer that "taking a man's livelihood is alike to killing him," in reference to DaBaby and Kevin Hart, both of whom lost major deals — a Lollapalooza performance and an Oscars host gig, respectively — in the wake of homophobic commentary, earlier moving on to other profitable opportunities. (It should exist noted, however, that Hart voluntarily stepped down and refused to host the Oscars despite continued invitation from the show'southward producers.) Just he's also talking about himself here, likening public critique and any imagined consequences he hasn't really experienced to a figurative loss of life. He does and then in a moment when transgender and gender-nonconforming people are literally dying. In the well-nigh recent special, Chappelle attempts to once once more leverage his "friendship" with trans woman and comedian Daphne Dorman as a sort of anti-apology for all the things he's said. He can't be transphobic because he has a trans adult female friend, right?

Part of Chappelle's early on appeal was his stoner amuse — he was the funniest pothead in the dorm. But in recent years that analogy has lost its savor, specially with students; for the new generation, his approach has been akin to an out-of-impact uncle who corners yous at the holidays when you're only trying to hang out with your cousins. He's forgotten what my students know: that comedy exists in the terrain where boundaries are recognized and then transgressed without harming people who don't deserve information technology. When boundaries are transgressed and people who don't deserve information technology are harmed, it's no longer comedy — information technology's horror.

Terminal calendar week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sent out a memo to Netflix staff in back up of Chappelle, saying, "While some employees disagree, we have a potent conventionalities that content on screen doesn't straight translate to real-world harm." Sarandos later walked back his defense as an "oversimplification," but it wasn't just too simple; it was demonstrably false. In talking most the existent-life implications of one-act, I refer my students to the tropes of the minstrel phase in the 19th century, which were used to support chattel slavery, recruit KKK members, and enact continuing violence against Black people. These racist caricatures demonstrated to eager white audiences that slavery was good for the enslaved because look at how happy their stand-in was on the phase. The operation was used to justify the condition quo and erase the appearance of the violent reality only so that the violent reality could exist in undercover. It was specifically intended to have real-life consequences. Chappelle — who left his multimillion-dollar contract with One-act Central in 2005 — certainly knows that more acutely than nearly. He quit later dressing upwardly every bit a Zip Coon minstrel in blackface. When he realized a white crew member was laughing at him and not with him, he concluded that the sketch was "socially irresponsible."

Today, his loudest supporters aren't talking about hilarity, they're talking nearly free speech, people beingness as well sensitive, abolish culture. He's not getting equally many laughs as he'due south getting "clapter" that's usually associated with self-satisfied leftist ideologies merely that here allows conservative viewpoints validation because they're being consort by a traditionally left-leaning Blackness homo. This kind of response has less to do with jokes and more to do with ridicule. Information technology shows you concur with who is existence targeted. Information technology'southward the sort of response the minstrel stage elicited, and it's also the response that made Chappelle leave his show in 2005 when it was directed at him. Of class, these same supporters are quick to remind people on social media that if you don't like his style, you lot don't take to watch. And, unfortunately for Chappelle, that might ultimately be what'southward happening. It's not until I bear witness students clips from Chappelle's earlier stand-up specials that they start to understand what was one time his appeal. They tin run across why we were laughing then, but they're watching a ghost of comedy past.

Dave Chappelle the One-act Relic