Comedian Dave Chappelle stomped across a woke minefield in his 2019 Netflix special “Sticks & Stones.”
Joke after joke hit targets presumably off-limits in our Cancel Culture age.
For Chappelle’s newest Netflix special, “The Closer,” he did it again. And the reaction from liberal critics is virtually unchanged.
Bigoted! Transphobic!
Yet Chappelle won’t be canceled, at least not yet.
“The Closer” finds the comic giant weighing in on his own critics, the attacks on “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and more. The audience reviews, so far, are in the mid-90s at RottenTomatoes.com. That mirrors the public reaction to “Sticks & Stones.”
Some professional critics, however, aren’t amused.
The far-left NPR, which purposely kept the Hunter Biden laptop scandal from its audience without evidence showing it was fake, slammed the production. The jokes, we’re told, go “too far.”
Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia.
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The far-left Guardian also blasted the special, with some obligatory nods to Chappelle’s gifts.
Rather than explore the blind spots within modern gender and racial thinking, the comedian’s latest special triples down on the phobia…
The trouble is, the phobic jokes keep coming – and Chappelle’s efforts to ironise them, to dance around rather than wallow in the boorishness, are derisory. They’re often plain weak, like the predictable “suck my dick” punchline to his joke about feminism needing male leadership.
A shopworn tactic of liberal critics is to demean subversive comics as having “nothing to say.” That’s how the far-left IndieWire tackles its “Closer” review. A comedian willing to push boundaries that would get most pros cancelled? That’s nowhere near “nothing,” from a content perspective.
Chappelle clearly prides himself on being a Speaker of Truths, prefacing more than a few mores-skirting doses of harsh reality with something along the lines of “I really shouldn’t say this, but…” Rarely do those truths extend beyond his own personal experience.
The same crowd that insists we “speak our truth” suddenly clutches some pearls at a comic doing just that?
The critic also suggests Chappelle is a master troll, forgetting how his peers describe every third barb as “transphobic,” “bigoted” or worse.
Chappelle clearly prides himself on being a Speaker of Truths, prefacing more than a few mores-skirting doses of harsh reality with something along the lines of “I really shouldn’t say this, but…” Rarely do those truths extend beyond his own personal experience.
So how does Chappelle get away with it? Let’s start with his genius-level talent. That helps.
So does his unwillingness to apologize. “You retreat, they encroach,” Adam Carolla warned about the woke warriors. Chappelle angered that community three years ago. He did it again this month.
No retreat, no surrender.
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Some of these critics may have forgotten what comedy is in the first place. Consider Professor Chappelle’s own advice on the subject.
“Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean,” he warns in a separate teaser for the comedy special. “Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean, I’m saying it because it’s funny.”
Simple. Direct. Accurate.
It’s why we laugh at pies to the face, people prat falling into pools and every third video on YouTube (or, to a previous generation, “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”)
It’s up to the audience to decide if the funny is worth the potentially bruised feelings. Tell enough lousy, mean-spirited jokes, and suddenly you’re playing to half-empty venues.
For now, at least, that’s the least of Chappelle’s concerns. And even a woke platform like Netflix quietly acknowledges just that by keeping him employed.
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