While Dave Chappelle Was Off the Grid, the Rest of Us Were Busy Evolving
In 2014, before the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby went mainstream, a standup routine from Hannibal Burress went viral. "Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate," Burress said during a set in Philadelphia. "'Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the '80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.' Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches." Buress's bit made headlines, prompting a procession of women to come forward with new allegations, which ultimately led to the undoing of Cosby the comedian-and Cosby the man.
Now skip forward two years.
"The '70s were a wild era, and while all this was going on, Bill Cosby raped 54 people. Holy shit, that's a lot of rapes, man! This guy's putting up real numbers. He's like the Steph Curry of rape." That's Dave Chappelle in 2017, likening Cosby's "400 hours of rape" to a Top Gun pilot. His first specials in 13 years-Netflix paid $60 million for three, the first two of which premiered last month on the streaming service-were considered his big comeback. Instead, they feel more like a throwback. In Age of Spin, Chappelle mimics flamboyant Hollywood producers, fears trans women cutting off their genitalia, and is in creases over a hypothetical superhero who rapes women to activate his powers.
No longer wiry like he once was, Chappelle is not only physically less nimble-he has also seemingly lost his nuance as a storyteller. His delivery is preachy, his punchlines banal. For Vice, Australian comic Patrick Marlborough writes that Chappelle's stand-up in the early '00s "had a sublime mastery of taking a taboo, reiterating it, guiding it to a point, flipping the meaning, and shooting it in the back of the head." As he watched the Netflix specials, however, he was forced to wait for the twist that never came. In its place stood a man who performed ignorance rather than questioning it, who had become trapped in the bubble of his own privilege-a world where the last 10 years of identity politics haven't really made much of a difference. ("The jokes were mean, they were lazy," Marlborough writes. "They were something I never thought I'd see: Dave Chappelle punching down.") Unfortunately that puts him out of touch with the cultural conversation at large, which has itself progressed and in turn shifted the way comedians tackle loaded topics like race, class, gender, and sexuality. In short, Dave Chappelle may not have progressed, but many of us have.
Chappelle's first specials in 13 years were considered his big comeback. Instead, they feel more like a throwback.
In a recent interview promoting his 2016 Netflix special Straight White Male, 60, SNL alum Dana Carvey admitted he had to recalibrate to "find where the rules are" now. Sarah Silverman had the same problem. She once fought for the right to use the pejorative "gay" until she suddenly become aware of her own obsolescence. "I stopped myself and said, 'What am I fighting?' I have become the guy from 50 years ago who says, 'I say colored. I have colored friends!'" she told Vanity Fair in 2015, adding, "I do think it's important, as a comedian, as a human, to change with the times, to change with new information. I think it's a sign of being old when you're put off by that."
After Louis C.K. publicly supported comedian Daniel Tosh, who had made a misogynistic offhand quip about an audience member being gang raped, he read a series of blogs that "enlightened" him and a year later debuted a welcome feminist spin on assault. "How do women still go out with guys, when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men?" he said in his act in 2013. "We're the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women...You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease."
The problem with refusing to consider the growth of one's audience is that anachronisms become conspicuous to the point that they threaten to overwhelm the entire act and the comedian himself. No one can mention Michael Richards anymore without thinking about his spectacularly racist Laugh Factory gig in 2006 in which he responded to a black audience member with the n-word and went so far as to reference Jim Crow. Then there's Tracy Morgan, who during a stand-up routine in Nashville in 2011 claimed he would stab his son to death if he ever found out he was gay. Meanwhile, the web was awash in what-the-fucks when Netflix announced its four-film deal with Adam Sandler considering his constant racist, sexist, homophobic atavisms-thinly veiled excuses to cash in on more paid vacations with his buddies. Jerry Seinfeld also continues to fuel Comedians in Cars with Coffee, his excuse to sate his mundane obsession with sports cars while exchanging back pats with a parade of Davos types like him. Question his jokes, and he calls you a college student.
America has woken up as the old guard-largely white, largely male-continues to slumber. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, the first late-night female-led political satire, has seen its audience swell by 175 percent-in a post-Trump age, political comedy seems to be where everyone is turning for catharsis. What sets her show apart from her late-night peers' is her push for a diverse writing team; her staff is 50 percent women and 30 percent non-white. One gets the feeling that her impassioned monologues each week speak more than just her anger, but the anger of those whom she describes as being "underestimated their entire careers."
In its recent Comedy of Politics issue, Wired announced: "Nobody wants to hear 'What's the deal with cheese?' jokes anymore. Comedy today is either a weapon or a source of catharsis." So instead of a show about nothing, we have Kevin Hart interrogating contemporary masculinity, Tig Notaro exposing her cancer to the world, Patton Oswalt publicly grieving over his recently deceased wife. It's to the point that even Chris Rock, despite agreeing with Seinfeld on the scourge of diplomacy, admits he needs to be malleable-more than that, curious: "Forget being a comedian, just act like a reporter," he says. "What's the question that hasn't been asked?"
"My question is, to what degree do I have to participate in your self image? You don't give a fuck how I feel, why should I give a fuck how you feel?" That's Chappelle in his second Netflix special, Deep in the Heart of Texas. Thirty minutes into that gig, the audience united in a cry of disbelief when Chappelle commented to the boyfriend of a drunk audience member, "Get some water in her, or you're going to have some dry pussy when you get home."
Of course, that did not dissuade him. Though Chappelle briefly discussed whether the term "pussy" was offensive, he proceeded to use it multiple times over an interminable eight minutes. ("Thirty-nine more where that came from," he quipped after one lengthy misfire.) It's pointless to wonder if he can make these kind of jokes; the question is: should he? And what does it say about his determination to deliver them? So relaxed was he in his position that at the beginning of this bit he proceeded to light up a cigarette, take a seat, and confabulate like it was 4 a.m. in his kitchen after a night of partying with trans people (Chappelle prefers to sling around the more discomforting pejorative). That's when it really became clear how alien Dave Chappelle actually is to our current time. Because only someone who is that out of touch with the world right now could be that comfortable in it.
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