Dave Chappelle and the still-doomed politics of shunning

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2021-10-20 16:00:05

I am not a fan of stand-up comedy as a genre, but out of loyalty to you the readers, I watched “The Closer” on Netflix so I could participate in the Dave Chappelle Discourse.

All things considered, it’s a useful case study in the value of checking things out for yourself rather than just reading takes. I don’t know that a person outraged about Chappelle’s jokes about trans people would feel better about them knowing that the special also oozes contempt for working-class white people and tars all police officers as trigger-happy racists, but it does create a somewhat different context. Most of this stuff, to be clear, is also kinda funny. There’s a really witless and homophobic joke about Mike Pence being gay that’s the kind of thing I like to think I outgrew in eleventh grade but that made me chuckle — Chappelle is a very good performer. But again, the fact that one of the most straightforwardly homophobic things in the special is just using “Mike Pence is gay” as a diss on Mike Pence is a sign that this is something other than right-wing politics.

Similarly, I actually think the toughest political hit in the whole special is two brief jokes about “space Jews” that haven’t gotten much attention outside of the Jewish press. The joke is basically that Israel is equivalent to a freed slave who turns around and enslaves other people (to make Zionists everywhere mad), but he then also attributes this to “Jews” (to make Israel-critical Jewish people mad). This is one that I, personally, was kind of upset about. Though, again, to be clear — I laughed at the joke. Chappelle is good at his job.