Dave Chappelle fills Netflix special with jokes about trans and disabled people
Dave Chappelle fills Netflix special with jokes about trans and disabled people
It’s the comedian’s first special for the streamer since 2021’s highly controversial ‘The Closer’
Dave Chappelle has released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, which is full of jokes about the trans community and disabled people.
“I love punching down!” he tells the audience, in a one-hour show that landed on the streaming service today (31 December).
It’s his seventh special for Netflix and comes two years after his last one, the highly controversial release The Closer.
That programme was criticised for its relentless jokes about the trans community, and Chappelle revisits the topic in his new show.
He tells jokes about trans women in prison, and about trans people “pretending” to be somebody they are not.
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What. The. Fuck.
I've never been the biggest Chappelle fan, but years ago, before he started going down this path, I had basic respect for him as a comedian. Now he's actually promoting punching down? And he didn't feel like he was punching down enough with trans people, so he had to be an ableist as well as a transphobe?
And Netflix would not have put this on their site sight unseen, so they 100% knew that this was a celebration of attacking vulnerable people.
Christ, even when I was in high school I knew that the guy who pushed the kid in the wheelchair over onto their side was a shithead and so did almost everyone else. So basically Chapelle wants his fan base to be the little weasel kid who stands behind the bully with a grin on his face because someone else is getting it when it could have been them.
I wonder if anyone will come in here and defend him with some mumbo jumbo about free speech?
Here he is introducing (and inadvertently humiliating) his friend Elon, who he shares a shocking amount of awful views with:
Chappelle still tries to act like he's one of the disenfranchised black people, while living in a mansion and hanging out with Elon Musk.
Money literally rotts the brain. Study after study shows wealthy people become more sociopathic as they accumulate more wealth and power. We shouldn't cap wealth just because it's morally right, it also prevents those in power from becoming all consuming sociopaths.
I saw that when the news broke and it was glorious. Sadly, it taught Elon absolutely nothing.
and chris rock! i was just thinking how these 2 used to be very funny, if not somewhat irreverent... i get it. but now theyre both on this conservative soap box its so weird!
theyve become the anti-carlin!
Carlin is Carlin. Everybody else only tries to approach him or has given up on the idea of doing it. The man had a 50+ year career with a consistent upwards trend. In 4 years we will be at the 20th anniversary of his death. And the man is still relevant and funny to this day.
Chappelle, Seinfeld, Allen, etc. All just hacks who got lucky. Would anyone even know who Seinfeld was without Larry David? That man is another gem for sure.
I can't even watch or recommend others to watch half baked any more between Chappelle and Bruer.
I haven’t heard about Rock. That’s disappointing. It’s a common thing with comedians these days to get upset if their comedy either goes to far or just isn’t funny and blame it on people being too sensitive. It feels like that’s been pushing some of them to the right even though that’s not really the issue they are being confronted with.
At least Chris just told rich people jokes about his kids in college. Wasn’t relatable, but it felt honest.
Wait, Chris Rock too!? WTH!!??
nothing quite as egregious as chappelle, but his recent special was completely class tone-deaf, and boring. ' i dont enjoy politically correct terminology', 'i am rich, entitled human', 'will smith sucks' were the main tones i remember from watching his last special.. that and thinking, 'when did chris rock get boring'?
For me, the dividing line when he became unfunny was when he started being in every Sandler movie. It was somewhere along the way that all of those comedians in those movies just lost it.
A lot of transphobes, white-supremacists, and similar ideologues would support eugenics for disabled people so that isn't a far off description. Whether comedians like him realize it or not, they are normalizing social darwinism essentially.
I wonder if anyone will come in here and defend him with some mumbo jumbo about free speech?
At this point I feel like Netflix is encouraging this kind of content.
Netflix is a bunch of suits. In their perfect world they can cater different content to trans people and to transphobic people at the same time, in order to make maximum money.
And on top of that they know that outrage fuels views. They keep making inflammatory content that will outrage one side and get the other to spite-view it. Of course inflammatory content to left wingers tends to be bigotted and hateful, while inflammatory to right wingers tends to just be anything not overwhelmingly white, straight, and patriarchal.
I read a view that not punching down is offensive and not right.
See it's based on everyone being equal and there is nothing wrong with being disabled (the person mentioning this view was disabled). So if you rip on all your friends for whatever, but then don't rip on your disabled friend for being disabled then that is treating them like that can't handle or whatever.
Honestly it's comedy, some isn't but most is offensive. Comedy doesn't have to be for everyone but I don't think it should be stopped just because someone doesn't like it. The whole punching up, punching down thing is just weird. It's a self imposed rule people treat like law.
I read a view that not punching down is offensive and not right.
See it's based on everyone being equal and there is nothing wrong with being disabled (the person mentioning this view was disabled). So if you rip on all your friends for whatever, but then don't rip on your disabled friend for being disabled then that is treating them like that can't handle it or that they aren't equal.
Honestly it's comedy, some isn't but most is offensive. Comedy doesn't have to be for everyone but I don't think it should be stopped just because someone doesn't like it. The whole punching up, punching down thing is just weird. It's a self imposed rule people treat like law.
"Everyone is equal, so it's offensive to punch up at a bully without also punching down at their victim" ...is a weird take.
If you think comedy largely has to be offensive and that ribbing your friends is the same as somebody going on TV and saying the same thing, you're missing out on a lot of good comedy. There's so much comedy that doesn't just come down to "saying something offensive for the shock factor."
See it’s based on everyone being equal and there is nothing wrong with being disabled (the person mentioning this view was disabled). So if you rip on all your friends for whatever, but then don’t rip on your disabled friend for being disabled then that is treating them like that can’t handle it or that they aren’t equal.
This comes off like "I can say the N word because I have a black friend and he finds it funny when I say it." Ribbing your friends has the implicit understanding between you and them that it's not ill intentioned or mean-spirited. You could make a joke about your friend's wheelchair, but you wouldn't walk up to a random person on the street in a wheelchair and make fun of them for it. You can make a racist joke with your friends because everybody there knows you're not being serious and you're probably making fun of the people who would actually make a joke like that, but if you go up in front of a bunch of strangers and do the same joke, they don't know that you're not being serious about it. It just sounds like you're being racist.
Punching up and punching down are very specific things, not just joking about a minority group or not; and they're not laws or rules, they're labels for a concept. Calling something a square isn't some self imposed rule - it's just the label for a rectangle that has 4 sides of identical length.
Punching down is specifically when you make jokes at the expense of a minority, rather than making jokes about a minority. It's the comedy equivalent of kicking a kid in the balls because your friends think it's funny. You can make trans jokes without it being yet another "I saw a chick with a dick and that's gross and I vomited" kind of joke. Punching down would be going on TV and making jokes about how black people aren't as intelligent as white people and that's why they're poor and do drugs and end up in prison. Not punching down would be making a joke about how all day people kept coming up to you and telling you how proud of you they are for being brave enough to be yourself and wishing you well in your transition...but you're not trans, you just forgot to put on makeup that day.
Punching up is when a joke is a criticism of a common minority experience at the expense of the people who perpetrate that experience. Like making a joke about how you know that a new black guy moved into town because suddenly everybody is calling you by his name; and when you finally meet the guy, it's like you're already best friends because you already know everything about each other. And then a random black guy you don't recognize shows up drunk in front of your house so you bring him over to your friend's house because you assume he's a friend of theirs - but they had brought him over to your house first because they assumed he was your friend.
Basically, if you have to be an asshole to be funny, then the only people who are gonna laugh are other assholes.
Comedy is funny. That's what it is.
It doesn't have to be offensive. But it can be offensive.
It's just a joke and being overly sensitive about something that isn't true can mean you miss a lot of good quality humour because you find it more important to be offended than to laugh.
It can be offensive, and offensive comedy can be absolutely hilarious. But, it's often rather lazy comedy and "it's just a joke" is also used by bigots to hide from the consequences of their awful opinions in the same way that bullies do after they get caught. It's important to know the difference between somebody making a joke and somebody telling you what they really think but are too afraid to say.
I dunno, there's a couple problems there. You can still punch up or punch down while recognizing that everyone's equal, because we can recognize that status doesn't have to really do with whether or not someone's equal. i.e. someone can be lower or higher status, monetarily, socially, while still being of equal worth, in terms of like, their value as a human. So you can still "punch up" or "punch down", because there's still problems in society, we don't live in a kind of totally equal utopia, or what have you, and to not recognize that and say that we do, and then use that as a justification to be able to punch down, you know, that would be bad.
Oftentimes, the reason people find ire with "punching down", is that it makes fun of people from the perspective of their lack of status and their lack of worth as a human. It's fine to make fun of disabled people, in general, but it's not really funny to make fun of someone who's in a wheelchair, for the fact they're in a wheelchair, most especially if you're not in a wheelchair, because that's punching down. You also see this thing where people who occupy minority positions, like being in a wheelchair, will try to ingratiate themselves to the majority, sometimes with some degree of success, by basically punching themselves in the face socially. "Oh, I'm in a wheelchair, isn't that so funny guys?", but unironically, which negatively impacts, in this example, the disabled, especially as it is used as evidence for being like "hey disabled people are okay with it" or "hey this other guy's okay with it, so if you complain, you're just lame and don't have a legitimate grievance". Now it's their "choice" to punch themselves, but we can also recognize it's arising from their need to try and improve their situation, and the extenuating circumstances, and so it's kind of not that funny in the broader picture, and we also try not to blame them for it on the basis that it's as a result of their circumstance.
You would probably get better laughs and better comedy out of it anyways, if you tried to point out the kind of existential insanity of being someone in a wheelchair, and moving through the modern world, which has not been crafted for you. People in wheelchairs have difficulty using the restroom, for example, because restrooms aren't really laid out for them, so you could maybe come at it from the angle of "why do we still have urinals", or "what the fuck is up with asian squat toilets", or something to that effect. Maybe make fun of everyone wanting you to cut off your legs, and give you robot legs, when really all you wanted was to have a wheelchair that lets you piss and shit, and like, an elevator that isn't broken. The reason chapelle's modern shit isn't that funny, imo, is because he doesn't understand the perspective of trans people enough to make effective jokes out of it. Which, to be fair, is pretty hard to do, if you're not trans. Which is sort of why most comedians don't try it, the same way most white comedians don't try to do racial comedy about black people.
That's not all to overcorrect and say that all his shit in "the closer" was bad, because it wasn't, and he had a handful of good points, but the problem is going to kind of arise when those good points also come with a handful of pretty bad points and pretty bad jokes. Just like his actual show. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say that a good amount of dave chappelle's popularity comes from the double tradeoff of it being extremely popular in the 2000's to kind of be more comfortable with being "edgy" and making fun of black people, on the basis that they're equal, and "I'm not a racist, so it's okay" type shit. People laughing at him, rather than with him, but on the basis that we live in a harmonious post-racial society, barring all of the "weird racists". He even ended up saying as much, as to why he wanted to quit his own show, that he felt people were laughing more at him. The double tradeoff I'm talking about, there, is that he was using the same platform, out the other side of his mouth, to make funny and insightful comedy that pushed the buck. He could attract white people looking to laugh at the minstrel and misogyny, but then turn around and give some good shit on top of it. Even just to portray the reality that black people were still oppressed. Is that tradeoff worth it? It maybe is, if you're able to give good enough insight to kind of balance the rest out, but if the insight is lacking, if the perspective is lacking, then obviously people are gonna be more likely to get very frustrated with it. That's all me talking out my ass, though.