A Closer look at Dave Chappelle’s recent work

‘Is it possible that a gay person can be racist?’ asks Dave Chappelle.

This is perhaps the driving central question that Dave Chappelle is struggling through, meditating on and trying to iron out with his final instalment of Netflix stand-up specials, The Closer. For even asking this question, for posing it – and for trying to work out in his usual button-pushing, boundary-smashing, politically-incorrect way some of its necessary ramifications – the woke Tumblr-liberal Twitter outrage machine for which Dave Chappelle can do no right since Sticks and Stones, along with its establishment legacy-media accoutrements from NPR to the Daily Beast, are dragging him behind the truck. Even GLAAD put out a statement condemning his routine.

Personal note here: I was a huge Chappelle’s Show fan when it first aired in my college years. Those sketches – Tyrone Biggins, Clayton Bigsby, his impressions of Prince and Lil Jon – are all still ridiculously funny. ‘I’m Wayne Brady, bitch!’ is never not going to be funny. It’s true, though, that in some ways he is treading on old ground, thematically speaking. At its best, Chappelle’s Show explored the really uncomfortable areas where racial violence, injustices, power imbalances and stereotypes interact with sexual expression and insecurities. People who were outraged about Chappelle making jokes about Leaving Neverland, or who say things like ‘too bad Dave died in ‘05’ as though 2005 Chappelle and 2021 Chappelle are irrevocably discontinuous, need to remember that he was making fun of the OJ Simpson trial, the R Kelly trial and the accusations about Michael Jackson, fifteen years before that. Moreover, he explains fairly clearly in the Chappelle’s Show sketch why he has such a sceptical attitude toward public treatment of black celebrities: he believes black men are held to an unjust racial standard, both socially and legally, based on racialised fears of black male physical prowess and sexuality. And here again we see this in his treatment of the recent ‘cancelling’ of rapper DaBaby over his alleged homophobia, while, Chappelle notes, his career suffered no such scrutiny when he shot and killed another black man in a Walmart.

That same theme, unsurprisingly, pops up repeatedly in The Closer. He recounts his various run-ins with fans and haters of his stand-up – one with an older white woman in a parking lot, one with a mother and transgender daughter in his hometown, one with a lesbian and her partner in a nightclub, and one with a gay man recording him on his phone while his friend tried to pester him who then called the police on him. True to form, his anecdotes are liberally sprinkled with ‘bitch’ and ‘nigga’, and they often depend on him exaggerating the antagonism that each of these fans or critics showed him at first. Occasionally they descend into deliberate self-mockery. But they do have a serious point to them. The point that Chappelle makes – directly and circuitously – is that human suffering is universal. Certain ‘tribes’ are not specially chosen by their suffering – not even black people. Chappelle remarks with a tinge of sadness the scenes of anti-Asian violence that he saw, much of it coming from black people, that he felt couldn’t be papered over. ‘Empathy is not gay. Empathy is not black. Empathy is bisexual – it must go both ways,’ Chappelle quips.

Here’s the thing. I suspect – I don’t know it to be the case, but I suspect – that I was the cause of Dave Chappelle’s long departure from comedy. That’s right, me.

Not me alone, of course. I wasn’t the only immature, thoughtless white kid in 2005 laughing along at Dave Chappelle doing impressions of famous black people, or portraying black stereotypes if only to make fun of those who hold them. But how much of a difference is there, really, if a white person laughs at a black person making fun of black people, and if a white person laughs at a white person making fun of black people? I genuinely believe Dave felt really bad about that: the fact that his blackness shielded him from criticism that he would otherwise get from his own ‘tribe’, when his jokes went too far against them. He wasn’t being a diva at all. You listen to him talk about how random white guys would come up to him on the street with his son and say: ‘I’m Rick James, bitch!’; or the heckling white kids screaming ‘White Power!’ at him when he performed in Hartford in 2013, and there’s genuine sadness there when he talks about it. Here’s the thing: I think those experiences, in his extended leave from comedy, informed and enriched his perspective. So when he appeared on SNL after Biden’s electoral victory last year, he was able to say this:

All these white people out there that feel that anguish, that pain, they’re mad ‘cause they think nobody cares—and maybe they don’t—let me tell you something. I know how that feels. I promise you, I know how that feels… Everyone knows how that feels. But here’s the difference between me and you: you guys hate each other for that. And I don’t hate anybody, I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through; that’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve got to find a way to live your life; find a way to forgive each other.

So, no. He’s not being a bigot. He’s not trying to ‘punch down’ on gay people or trans people. Even when he’s defending Jo Rowling or DaBaby or Kevin Hart, or putting himself on ‘Team TERF’, he’s not ‘punching down’. He’s not trying to play a ‘zero-sum game’ with his humour. He’s still trying to get through to the people who go around wearing their pain and anguish like a chip on their shoulder, and ask them to use a bit of real empathy. This was the point of his lengthy bit about the sadly-passed trans comedian Daphne Dorman at the end of his set. If you listen carefully, he wasn’t using her memory as a human shield to deflect criticism – he doesn’t need to do that because he knows he’s gonna get criticised no matter what. He was trying to demonstrate what real empathy can and should look like.

My take on The Closer is that it aligns with, and is of a piece with, what Chappelle has been trying to do all along. Dave clearly believes that there is a purpose in his art, a purpose that he himself acknowledges openly that he doesn’t always succeed in attaining. He’s using his deliberately button-pushing humour, getting into those uncomfortable places where race and sexuality butt heads, and to a certain extent he is doing it to provoke. But the purpose of that provocation is to try and get black men to empathise with how Asians suffer. To try and get gays, lesbians and heterosexual women to empathise with how black men have historically suffered and continue to suffer. To try and get trans folks to empathise with how cis women suffered and suffer. And to remind people that, however much ‘failure’ hurts, even ‘success’ doesn’t make you happy or fulfilled. In a way, Chappelle has intuitively understood the ‘woke’, seen through the poststructuralist Tumblr charade of ‘intersectionality’… and is trying to show us the difference between ‘allyship’ (which brooks no laughter or criticism) and real solidarity.