Dave Chappelle’s Rorschach Test
At the end of Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix stand-up special—after 72 brutal, bruised, combative minutes that conclude with the story of a suicide—my other half turned to me and said: “That wasn’t very funny, was it?”
Was it even meant to be? The emotion that defines The Closer is not laughter, but anger. Chappelle once delivered his most offensive jokes with a goofy, quizzical, little-lost-boy smile, removing some of their sting, but here the humor feels sour and curdled. The stoner who never gave a shit seems genuinely frustrated and goaded on by social-media pile-ons. An alternative title for the special might be A Response to My Critics.
Artists tend to be annoyed when critics grade their work on its political content rather than its technical and creative choices, and yet responding to any other way is hard. The special draws its energy from one of the hottest debates in popular culture, about competing claims to victimhood. Its jokes about LGBTQ people have led to , the special from Netflix, of a transgender Netflix employee who protested the special. In , the writer Saeed Jones declared, “I feel like a fool to have rooted for Dave Chappelle for so long.”
