The Dave Chappelle Problem Is Worse Than You Think

I f you haven’t watched Dave Chappelle’s “controversial” Netflix special, The Closer, your impression of what’s happening probably runs something like this: Edgy comedian risks overstepping boundaries with potentially inflammatory material about transgenderism, the trans community and its allies go ballistic, Netflix is forced to apologize, and the world wonders whether Netflix is going to remove the show from its platform. In this formulation Chappelle becomes a champion of the cultural norm — as opposed to the First Amendment standard — that ostensibly nonpartisan media platforms such as Netflix should give wide latitude to artists to express themselves.

And Chappelle is paying a startling price: The comic says that a film he made of another stand-up routine has been ditched by several national film festivals that had previously accepted it. You might say the film has been canceled. Chappelle is probably the highest-paid and most successful stand-up comic on the planet, and so the film will find an audience. (He is vowing to take it on the road himself.) Yet even he has to start thinking about alternate means of delivering his art to the public.

All of this is making Chappelle something of a martyr for free speech. Okay, he’s a centimillionaire martyr, but still: It’s pretty unusual to be disinvited from a film festival. And Netflix’s cringing apology, after initially expressing support for Chappelle, suggests it may still enact some kind of mob-appeasement measure. Among the trans-activist demands are that the streaming service attach to the special a disclaimer warning that it “contains transphobic language, misogyny, homophobia, and hate speech.”

But “comic gets in trouble for being edgy” isn’t exactly what’s going on with Chappelle. Audience members at his recent shows in London are saying that Chappelle came across as baffled by the contretemps. And baffled he should be, because in The Closer Chappelle doesn’t say anything unusually controversial in the first place. “I go hard in the paint,” he boasts in the special, and he offers several variations of “It’s gonna get worse,” but you have to make a feast out of crumbs if you’re looking to nourish your sense of outrage at Chappelle’s remarks about transgenderism.

Chappelle’s detractors have done their best to accomplish just that, but even taking a line or two out of context, they haven’t come up with much. “Gender is a fact,” Chappelle says, but even if you think he’s wrong, this is hardly an outré point of view. Only a small percentage of Americans would disagree. He says that he’s “Team TERF,” meaning he agrees with J. K. Rowling — who is sometimes labeled a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” — that you can’t be female unless you were born female. He marvels that the rapper DaBaby (real name Jonathan Kirk) was canceled for offensive comments about homosexuality rather than for fatally shooting a 19-year-old in a North Carolina Walmart. (Charges were dropped after a key witness failed to testify.) Chappelle doesn’t defend DaBaby’s (vile) remarks about gays — “Even I saw that s*** [and] was like, “God damn, DaBaby!” — he simply muses about the disconnect in a culture that can focus obsessively on hurtful words but shrug at lethal action. Prior to The Closer, it was perhaps not even widely known that the rapper had shot and killed someone. The deadly incident didn’t attract a great deal of national media coverage, much less the kind of breathless commentary that has accompanied Chappelle’s special.

In The Closer Chappelle not only doesn’t seek to offend transgender individuals, he speaks at great length and with great sorrow and compassion about a transgender comic, Daphne Dorman, who committed suicide. The two met at some Bay Area shows where, Chappelle notes, “She would be there, white trans woman, laughing loud and hard, at everything I said. Especially the trans jokes, very puzzling . . . because she was obviously trans.” Chappelle offered some career tips and the pair became friends. At least two members of Dorman’s family have said that Dorman would have loved hearing Chappelle’s remarks about their friendship. Noting that Daphne jumped off a building, Chappelle says, “Clearly . . . only a man would do some gangster s*** like that. Hear me out. As hard as it is to hear a joke like that I’m telling you right now, Daphne would have loved that joke.” Chappelle says that he set up a trust fund for Dorman’s daughter:

The daughter is very young, but I hope to be alive when she turns 21 ’cause I’m going to give her this money myself. And by then, by then, I’ll be ready to have the conversation that I’m not ready to have today. But I’ll tell that little girl, “Young lady, I knew your father . . . and he was a wonderful woman.”

That’s a lovely, warm tribute, without an ounce of nastiness to it. Chappelle’s routine isn’t transgressive. It isn’t edgy. It doesn’t cross any red lines. Chappelle may throw some elbows in the paint sometimes, but on transgenderism, he is as thoughtful and sensitive as anyone could possibly hope a stand-up comic could be.

Which is why I put quotation marks around “controversial” above. What controversy? A handful of Netflix employees — the New York Times reported it was “dozens” in a firm that employs 9,400 — attended a rally last week to make some noise about Chappelle, but every day in this country there are “dozens” of protesters showing up to rally against this or that. Dozens of protesters routinely show up for school-board meetings without the national media taking any interest whatsoever, much less assigning two reporters to the matter as the Times did.

The Chappelle affair, then, is merely a case of the media hyping and exaggerating the popularity of an extremist agenda enthusiastically backed by its woke reporters and commentators. And what is that agenda? No jokes that find humor in transgenderism. Not even the mildest, tamest, gentlest, most sympathetic comic musings are permitted. We’re watching the rollout of a new policy before our eyes; transgender jokes are the new N-word and must be scrubbed from the public discourse. Chappelle may be too popular to be shut down, but the rest of the culture is receiving the message loud and clear. To the comics who pride themselves on being “rebels” and “free thinkers” who “break boundaries” and “don’t play by the rules,” it’s your move.