For any of you that don’t know, Dave Chappelle is probably one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time. The man is an absolute genius, and if you haven’t watched any of his stand-up, I can say with complete honesty that you’re missing out on life. If you have watched him, though, then you know that Chappelle is a master at his craft. If you need any proof at all, go watch his new Netflix special, The Closer. It’s pure brilliance, and I think that it should be required viewing for anyone that wants to have a Twitter account.
To say that Chappelle is controversial would be a bit of an understatement, so it’s no surprise that we have a bunch of fun-hating, unintelligent, lacking senses of humor people that are now trying to cancel him for the jokes he made in this most recent stand-up special. And hey, I get that Chappelle might not be for everyone. I’m not saying that everyone has to like his comedy – or even him as a person, but the backlash for this comedy special is yet another example of people who have nothing better to do than be miserable taking things completely out of context to better suit their own personal narratives.
What all of these people refuse to understand is that comedy is an artform, and Chappelle is a DaVinci of his field. He points out in brilliant ways the ridiculousness of a lot of the “issues” we’re facing in modern society, and he hammers home a point pretty clearly throughout the special that, and I’m paraphrasing here, “LGBTQ people are minorities, until they need to be white again.” The basic point here is that there are a lot of people who criticize jokes – and let’s be clear here, these are jokes – that he’s made in the past surrounding the LGBTQ community, who don’t actually listen to what he’s saying or take things completely out of context. He states pretty explicitly in the special that the people at the butt of those jokes, if you listen, were never gay, trans, bisexual, or anybody except for white people. But of course, we have every pink-haired white girl who has had what can only be described as a comfortable and safe upbringing hop on Twitter to “cancel” Chappelle after seeing a clip of his comedy taken completely out of context.
So, before any of you decide that Chappelle is a bad person, go and watch his specials with an open mind. If you do that it’s pretty easy to see that what he’s saying are (I’m italicizing it again for emphasis) jokes. If you don’t want to hear those jokes, then don’t watch it but also just shut the fuck up. If you don’t think he’s funny, then you’re not the intended audience, so stop watching and keep your thoughts to yourself. The whole point of comedy is to talk about and make light of things that are typically hard to talk about, and Dave Chappelle does that perfectly. He points out very clearly that as a regular person, he loves all everybody because he simply sees everyone as people having a human experience. The jokes he makes are no more a definition of who he is as a person than a guitar solo from Jimi Hendrix defined who he was as a person. He’s just trying to make people laugh, and guess what? He’s making a lot of people laugh – people who are confused in the sudden changes to grammar, people who are afraid to ask question because everything you say can be turned against you, people that’re trying to learn and better themselves but that can’t do it with the flip of a switch.
I’ll end my rant defending Chappelle and comedy in general with this: if you can’t be entertained by Dave Chappelle, that’s fine, but don’t go and ruin it for everyone who has a sense of humor. Not everyone is a miserable sack of shit who just want to see everyone else as sad as you are.
-Strokes
