Dave Chappelle and the Cancellation that Wasn't
A critical analysis of the Netflix special "The Closer" and the controversy surrounding it
I’ve been a fan of Dave Chappelle’s comedy since The Chappelle Show. That said, I don’t think I’ve watched many of his comedy specials. Maybe two or three? Usually I just see clips when surfing YouTube. I certainly wasn’t planning on watching “The Closer” - nothing against Chappelle; I just generally don’t watch a ton of standup.
But then this “controversy” exploded. I put “controversy” in scare quotes because I’m not sure it is one. Chappelle seems to have set out to attract a great deal of attention to his comedy special by addressing a topic which currently generates a lot of outrage on the internet, and then done so successfully. So from where I sit, it sort of looks like everyone is on the same page. Chappelle is getting a lot of attention. People are watching “The Closer” out of outrage or curiosity or a desire to be in on the latest twitter thing. Netflix is getting clicks it wouldn’t have otherwise got. The CEO of Netflix made a statement that made me think about the CEO of Netflix for the first time ever, and I had a Netflix subscription back when they used to send you DVDs in the mail. Apparently employees are planning a walkout. It was that news, specifically, that made me decide I needed to watch the special for myself to see what could be so bad that people would risk their jobs over it.
I should say: obviously, there are real people who are genuinely upset by all of this - people who have a stake in trans discourse in the media - and for those people the controversy is real and meaningful. It’s just that by and large those are not the people getting all the attention. The people who are getting the attention are the ones playing “controversy” as if it were a team sport.
Certainly Chappelle isn’t upset by all of this. Throughout the special he repeatedly remarks - almost gleefully - on how many boundaries he’s crossing and how much trouble he’s going to get into. It’s pretty clear that he’s doing this on purpose - just daring critics to come after him, yet again, and see what happens. The “I make you mad and you reward me with attention” dynamic isn’t real controversy, though - it’s just sort of trolling. A lot of this is literally just Chappelle trolling his critics, and his critics taking the bait and Streisanding Chappelle to the top of twitter’s trending topics lists. Later, Chappelle said that if this is what cancellation is like, then bring it on. He loves the attention.
I’m not going to tell trans activists how to do their jobs, and not everything has to be a carefully planned tactical operation. Sometimes something offends you and you just speak out about it, and it’s not about messaging or anything. I get that. But the principal impact of this “controversy” seems to be that many, many more people are listening to what Chappelle has to say about trans issues, and social issues more broadly.
So let’s take a look at that.
Space Jews
“Space Jews” was one of the first of Chappelle’s jokes that fell flat for me. It starts early on - he tells a story about seeing a bunch of news about UFOs and writing a screenplay in which the aliens are the former inhabitants of Earth who had trouble here, left, and then came back thousands of years later to reclaim their land. The punchline of the joke was “I call it ‘Space Jews.’”
The joke here, for those who don’t get it, is that the Jews left Israel thousands of years ago and then later came back to reclaim it. It’s sort of an anti-Zionist joke, I suppose, except I wasn’t comfortable with his conflation of Zionist Israelis with Jews in general. I thought he was painting with too broad a brush.
Later, Chappelle talks about a slave who earned his freedom, became a successful plantation owner, and bought slaves of his own - treating them even more cruelly than most white slaveowners. Chappelle said they were making a movie about this guy, and they were going to call it “Space Jews”. This is obviously a callback, and again, it’s also a critique of Israel. The Jews were slaves in Egypt, oppressed for centuries, victimized by various regimes including the Nazis, but then when they gained their freedom they supposedly went on to be comparatively even more cruel to the Palestinians. Again, the conflation of all Jews with Israel is wrong. Also as poorly as modern Israel is treating the Palestinians, so far it hasn’t amounted to something which is comparatively crueler than the Holocaust. But looking past that, what’s Chappelle’s point?
Chappelle never makes the comparison explicit, but he’s talking about trans activists here. In fact, what’s interesting about the whole comedy special is that Chappelle does this a lot in this special - he uses stories and jokes as allegories to support his main thesis, often without explicitly acknowledging it. You have to think about “Space Jews” to understand why it isn’t out of place at all in this special. You have to see past the offensive part - because it is offensive - in order to understand Chappelle’s point. And that, in itself, can be read as commentary. Sometimes, to understand something, you have to look past the offensive part.
Chappelle ends the special by asking LGBTQ people to stop “punching down” at his people. “Space Jews” is an allegory that says that just because a group has faced problems and endured injustice, they don’t have the right to cause problems and injustice for others. I think this is obviously true - but I’m not sure Chappelle quite succeeded in demonstrating that it was applicable. He didn’t convince me that trans activists are treating him, or anyone else, in a way analogous to the way Israelis are treating Palestinians. On the other hand, even if you agree - as I do - that Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is wrong, the history of what the Jews have faced does, if not excuse, then at least explain it. You want to see it stop but you understand the pain behind it. It’s a tough issue and needs to be treated with sensitivity. Maybe Chappelle is just trying to say that he gets it - that suffering begets suffering - even if he doesn’t like it. One of the features of allegory is that it lends itself to multiple interpretations. But this is why I think that “The Closer” is much more complex than critics are giving it credit for.
Punching Down
Chappelle weaves together several examples of (white) LGBTQ people “punching down” at his people. It’s a little bit subtle, because he never explicitly says “here’s an example of punching down”. In fact, the first time he mentions the term “punching down” he expresses skepticism at the concept itself.
One example is Da Baby - a rapper who had been high in the music charts until his comments about Lil Nas X and AIDS got him “canceled”. Another example is Kevin Hart getting "canceled” over homophobia, resulting in losing the chance to host the Oscars. Another is a story about Chappelle getting harassed in public by a gay man. Chappelle confronts the man, ready to fight it out, but instead the guy calls the police on him. (This is the part of the special where Chappelle says “gay people are minorities - until they need to be white again” - which I’ll come back to). According to Chappelle, a black gay man wouldn’t have called the police - he would have known that getting the police involved would be dangerous for all black people there.
Finally, Chappelle tells the story of a trans friend, Daphne Dorman, who committed suicide. Dorman had defended Chappelle in a previous controversy of Chappelle’s jokes about trans people - and as a result, endured days of bullying on twitter by other trans people and their allies. Chappelle speculates that this bullying by other trans people may have contributed to Daphne’s suicide. Dorman wasn’t black, but Chappelle explicitly identifies her as a member of his “tribe” - comedians - and therefore as one of “his people.”
These stories aren’t just the typical “activists have gone too far” complaints by someone who was justly criticized (although there is some element of that in the special). They are also meant to problematize the concept of “punching down”. The concept of “punching down” was created to explain why some types of comedy, aimed at certain targets, might not be acceptable. Comedians and satirists should aim to “punch up” - to mock and satirize targets that are higher on some hierarchy than the comedian. Speaking truth to power has a social value. Bullying the already downtrodden does not.
This concept explains why, for example, it’s (intuitively, for many) fine for Chappelle to do racial humor in which he says something like “my problem has always been with white people” but it would not be okay for a white comedian to do racial comedy about how they have always had a problem with black people - because society has placed White above Black in a hierarchy, and ruthlessly enforces that hierarchy, and so comedians who challenge that hierarchy (by “punching up”) are doing a service for the oppressed, but comedians who reinforce that hierarchy (by “punching down”) are doing harm to the oppressed.
But Chappelle tries to illustrate the problem with this concept, which is that there is no clear hierarchy between “Black” and “LGBTQ”, and to the extent that there is such a hierarchy, it favors White people over Black people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Bill Burr famously and controversially joked about a similar premise when hosting SNL - in which he pointed out White women’s complicity in Black oppression and how Black history month was the shortest and coldest month whereas LGBTQ pride gets a normal summer month.
These critiques - and broadly, the idea that “white feminism” has been an inconsistent ally to Black liberation - are closely related to intersectional feminism. Chappelle explicitly mentions Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech which is often cited as an early and influential intersectional work. He uses it to suggest that white feminists wanted to exclude black people and separate the women’s rights movement from the abolition movement.
“The Closer” has been described as nothing but an unhinged, anti-trans rant, but that’s categorically untrue. Chappelle makes an interesting and sophisticated critique here of the relationship between identity groups - Blacks, women, LGBTQ people, etc. - and shows why a simple “up” and “down” relation doesn’t properly or coherently situate these groups in relationship to each other. There is a history to be reckoned with. There are tensions. There are cases, as Chappelle mentioned in his story about the gay white guy who called the cops on him, where LGBTQ people can use white privilege to put Black lives in danger. Ultimately, I think Chappelle wants us to see that a framework which places a Black comedian (or rapper) “above” trans people is racist (or at least racially problematic) - in the same way excluding Sojourner Truth from the women’s movement would have been racist, or a white person calling the police on a black person after harassing him publicly was racist.
Chappelle seems to be trying to point this out without inverting the relationship. He’s not saying “Blacks are the most oppressed”. He’s not erasing Black LGBTQ people (he mentions that a Black gay guy would have had racial solidarity with him - and his stories, about being confronted in public, all feature white people being mad at him). Rather, he’s saying - if I can make perhaps a bold interpretation - that everyone suffers by virtue of being human, and that shared suffering invalidates the concept of “punching down.”
This is what Chappelle means when he talks about Daphne, his trans friend, confronting him at one of his shows. She tells him “I just want you to understand that I am having a human experience.” Chappelle responds, “it takes one to know one.” We’re all having a human experience. Chappelle also talks a bit about universal human suffering, and a bit about how empathy has to go both ways. Overall, it’s a subtle but strong challenge to the concept of “punching up” and “punching down”.
Performative Misogyny and Performative Transphobia
There’s enough misogyny in “The Closer” that it’s almost surprising that Chappelle didn’t come under fire for it. And yet, it’s not simple, straightforward misogyny. In fact, the way he does his misogynist humor makes you wonder if it’s real or not. It’s performed, obviously, but it’s performed in a way that seems carefully calculated to make you ask whether he is a misogynist or whether he is satirizing misogynists, or maybe a little bit of both.
One way he does this is by lampshading some of the misogynist parts of his act. He goes into a story about a woman who confronted him outside a shopping mall in Ohio and said she thought he hated women. He claims he took this to heart but was puzzled. The punchline is the ironic “what could I possibly be saying that would make these bitches think that I hate women?” In other words, he basically outright admits that he knows that use of the term “bitches” reads as misogynistic to his critics - but he continuously, intentionally does it anyway throughout the set.
You have to assume that Chappelle didn’t do this by accident. He’s a professional and he workshopped this routine. Why did he explicitly make sure that the audience knew that he knew that his act was misogynistic and would be received poorly by women, or in particular by feminists? Use of the term “bitches” isn’t even close to the worst parts of the special, by the way - he has jokes about beating and killing women, about lesbians being ugly and mannish, about white women aging poorly, etc.
At the same time, Chappelle calls himself a “feminist” multiple times in the set - which he defines as “a human being that believes in equal rights for women”. He does this while critiquing racism within feminism, and also while identifying with “TERFs” who argue that gender is real.
In fact, he goes into a bit about how what feminists really need is a male leader to get them on the right track. He says that if he were in charge of feminism he would make sure women got equal rights, including equal pay for equal work, and a harassment-free workplace. The punchline comes when he says that in return he would ask for sexual favors, and so women would be right back to square one.
Given that Chappelle has clearly studied the feminist movement to an extent, it seems likely that he knows that this was a common trope in internet feminist discussion, especially during the 2000s. There was a bit of a backlash against “well-meaning” men coming in and trying to tell feminists how to do feminism. This ended up contributing to a debate as to whether men could call themselves feminists at all, and led to the compromise measure which most people have accepted today - that men can be “allies” to the feminist movement, and to other rights movements (so straights can be allies to the gay rights movement, cis people can be trans allies, etc.).
Even if Chappelle doesn’t have all those details, he seems aware of the concept that men leading the feminist movement would be problematic. His entire shtick on being a feminist leader clearly had a level of irony and self-awareness.
So what about the misogyny? There’s an argument to be made that being self-aware - the fact that the audience knows Chappelle knows that it’s wrong to beat women, for example - mediates the misogyny. That while he’s showing an example of bad behavior, he’s doing it deliberately in a way that clearly signals to the audience “this is bad behavior, don’t do it.” On the other hand, he’s still doing it. Arguably it would be better for him to lead by example and e.g. stop calling women “bitches” at every opportunity.
So it’s complicated. And it’s complicated further by the fact that this seems to be another allegory - it seems like Chappelle wants us to take the idea that you can support women’s rights while still being kind of a misogynistic jerk in a performative hipster ironic way as long as you’re mostly aware of where the boundaries are - and apply it to trans rights. Chappelle wants us to look at his opposition to anti-trans bathroom laws and his willingness to learn which pronouns to use and his friendship with a trans person and then evaluate his jokes about trans people within that context.
In other words, I said at the top of this section that it was surprising that no one seems to be criticizing Chappelle’s rampant misogyny in this set - but maybe it’s actually not so surprising. Maybe we’ve settled the debate and decided that a comedian joking about beating up a woman in a bar because he thought she was a man is actually within bounds as long as no one thinks the comedian is actually advocating violence against women. And maybe Chappelle thinks we should settle the debate over trans humor the same way.
When Chappelle repeats - again, with irony - that he is “transphobic” he wants you to know that performative transphobia as a means of comedic satire or self-satire is different from actually being mean to actual trans people in real life, and that he knows the difference, and we should too. Just as Chappelle thinks it was worse for Da Baby to literally shoot a man dead than it was to make homophobic comments about AIDS, Chappelle thinks it was worse for trans activists to bully Daphne Dorman than it was for Chappelle to make whatever jokes got him in trouble with trans activists in the first place.
Does this work? It does and it doesn’t. It’s undermined by the fact that Chappelle’s performative misogyny is dialed up so high that it’s not always clear when or if he’s being ironic. Using slurs against lesbians and joking about feminists being unattractive comes off, to me, as gratuitous, and not necessary to make the point. It’s not clear he doesn’t genuinely think of feminists as unattractive lesbians, and lesbians as manly women who suffer from “toxic masculinity”. Even if Chappelle did mean all of this ironically, there’s a danger of it coming across as genuine and hurting real people.
At the same time, it does serve the purpose of illustrating how completely normal that problem is. There are tons of misogynistic comics who make disparaging jokes about women or casually talk about beating and murdering them. Maybe some of them are so offensive they never make it onto my radar, but the ones I’ve heard of seem totally immune to cancellation for misogyny. If Chappelle wants to show off that he can joke about women and white people and no one seems to mind, so therefore he should be able to make similar (or actually, much tamer) jokes about trans people, I guess he sort of succeeded. If we cancel “The Closer”, do we have to cancel every comedy show where someone has joked about hitting or killing a woman? What’s the standard? Who knows - maybe in ten or twenty years we’ll be pulling misogynistic standup out of circulation the way Disney pulled Song of the South. In any case, the point is we’re not there yet. Chappelle knows he can get away with the “slap bitches” routine - so why are trans people off limits?
Chappelle, Rowling, and the Bathroom Test
Before he brings up J.K. Rowling, Chappelle uses the example of an anti-trans bathroom law in North Carolina to refute the claim that he is transphobic. He describes the law as “mean” and said that “no American should have to present a birth certificate” to use a public restroom. He explains that he’s more comfortable with the idea of a man with a vagina using the restroom with him than the idea of a woman with a penis using the restroom with him.
Since I have been harshly critical of Rowling and her statements about trans people, I feel compelled now to hold Chappelle to the same standard. While Rowling demands that we define people by their body parts - mocking those who say “people who menstruate” and tweeting out support for people who claim that trans women aren’t women - Chappelle seems completely comfortable describing a trans woman - even a trans woman with a penis - as a woman, and a trans man as a man. While Rowling focuses on the threat that men in dresses pose to little girls in bathrooms, Chappelle dismisses this concern out of hand without even explicitly mentioning it.
That bears repeating: Chappelle deliberately omits explicit mention of the most harmful anti-trans trope in his discussion of trans people using the restroom of their choice. He makes a passing, implied reference to it, which he dismisses out of hand, before moving the discussion back to the salient issue of real people who genuinely just need to use the bathroom.
Chappelle’s later comments about Rowling need to be seen in this context. I didn’t find Chappelle’s “team TERF” comment funny or agreeable but the fact is he’s far more progressive than Rowling on this particular issue. He didn’t talk about his views on kids transitioning and I don’t care to guess what he’d say about it, but despite aligning himself with Rowling, his ideas about how trans people should be treated are nowhere near as odious as hers are. This is not a defense of Chappelle, who doesn’t need me to defend him in any case. I just know that people are going to associate the two in the discourse from now on, and I don’t think it’s accurate or helpful to conflate their very different views on trans ontology and trans rights.
As another example, at one point in his set, Chappelle said that gender is a construct, and that he is personally invested in it but thinks that other ideas can also exist. Rowling, TERFs, and other transphobes say that gender is an immutable biological fact and that any other ideas are “anti-science” and “dangerous”. These things are not the same. I think Chappelle’s set was offensive, to be sure - but Rowling and others trying to stir up moral panic about the danger to children from the trans agenda and lobbying for anti-trans policy goes beyond mere offense and into the realm of actually stripping trans people of their rights.
I have to note that Chappelle later backtracked and said that gender is a fact, but then backtracked again and said “I’m not saying trans women aren’t women,” but then backtracked again by pointing out that trans women’s vaginas are artificial. In other words, Chappelle refuses to articulate a consistent view on the ontology of gender. It may be that he doesn’t have one. It may be that he’s debating himself, and that he feels there are good arguments for both a biological component and a socially constructed component of gender. It may be that he’s concealing his real opinion for the benefit of the comedy. Ultimately, it’s relatable - it reflects the way society at large has had to process our changing understanding of trans people and the words we use to talk about them.
The Closer
I’m willing to give credit to Chappelle for this: he is publicly wrestling with a difficult issue in a context where his own opinions are evolving (he stated during the special that he used to use transphobic language like “tranny” without knowing that those words were wrong - his word, “wrong”), in a society where there is a raging and often vicious public battle about the issue, and where one side is constantly attacking him for expressing his opinions on the issue. I think a lot of people who will watch this special are somewhere close to where Chappelle is now, in the sense of feeling attacked by activists who are pushing an agenda which seems very new and strange and full of words they’ve never heard. If they end up agreeing with Chappelle’s points - that trans people are human and having a human experience, that we all need to have empathy for each other, that we should respect people’s pronouns and not use anti-trans slurs, and that it’s not good to deny trans people access to human rights like the right to access public restrooms - then Chappelle’s public reckoning with these issues will have done some good.
If, on the other hand, most people get the digest version - “Dave Chappelle is transphobic” - and people spend several weeks screaming at each other over it, each growing increasingly disgusted with the other side, while dishonest right-wingers who don’t give a damn about trans people fold it into their victimhood narrative about “cancel culture” - then I think the special will have had a net negative impact on the discourse and on people’s lives.
It’s hard to say which way it will go. What is bigger - the number of Netflix viewers who ignore dumb internet arguments, or the number of internet users who will get outraged but never watch the special? From what I’m seeing online, it seems like audience reception of The Closer is hugely positive, outside of activist circles.
I have many mixed feelings about this special. It is one of the most offensive things I’ve ever watched - it’s not just offensive to trans people, but also to Jews, women, gays, and lesbians at various points. It’s also brilliant. It’s subtle and well-crafted, using allegory and allusion and juxtaposition and historical narratives to make its points. It’s very funny, but also there were a few jokes that went so far across the line that it took me completely out of the comedy. It’s tragic and empathetic and human, and also vulgar and obscene and human. I guess I would recommend it if you have a very high tolerance for offensive humor, because if you can put that aside, it’s mostly very good. I don’t think it contributes much to the discourse that you couldn’t find elsewhere without the “haha lesbians are manly” nonsense, but maybe it does a good job of presenting some of these ideas to a wider audience?
As for the cancellation attempt - like I said before, the main impact this seems to be having is to convince holdouts like me to watch the thing out of morbid curiosity. Come to think of it, I would never have known J.K. Rowling’s views on medical interventions for trans children if not for the whole cancellation battle. Maybe we’re all going about this all wrong and amplifying only the views of the most outrageous people on any given topic isn’t actually good for anyone as it just pollutes the discourse with the most polarizing crap and prevents us from building consensus on important issues. But that’s hardly the activists’ fault - as Chappelle pointed out, people can go horribly wrong by just responding to incentives, and social media unfortunately is a minefield of bad incentives.
Protesting “The Closer” can also be a show of solidarity with trans people. One of the reasons that the Rowling problem was so harmful was that many trans people loved Harry Potter and felt inspired by its apparent message of inclusion. Rowling hurt them, and showing solidarity by repudiating her transphobia was urgent.
Chappelle, on the other hand, doesn’t have a dedicated cadre of trans fans who’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. They mostly wouldn’t have heard of “The Closer” if twitter hadn’t made A Thing out of it. Again, I think in that sense the cancellation attempt may have been counterproductive.
Finally, a successful cancellation could serve as a deterrent against future people transgressing the norms that the cancellers are trying to enforce. Once more, given that this cancellation seems to be giving Chappelle exactly the attention he wanted, this does not seem likely to have that deterrent effect. If anything it could backfire, incentivizing people to be deliberately controversial about trans issues in order to get attention.
By all indications, this cancellation has failed. We find the defendant “Not Canceled”.
And I think that’s the right outcome, for where we are right now. I’m not trans, or Black, or a comic. I can’t say definitively how this show will impact anyone in a group that has an actual stake in the matter. But having watched it, it didn’t incite me to hate trans people. It made me think that Chappelle is open-minded enough to listen to criticism and take it to heart - enough to change the words he uses to talk about trans people. I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that might have on an audience. And I would think that Chappelle’s ideal relationship with trans people - “empathy with offensive jokes” - may not be for everyone, but it’s certainly better than “lobbying against trans rights”, which is the bar I’d personally set before I’d consider it appropriate to socially sanction someone, through cancellation or otherwise.
As an aside, I just want to note that there are people on the internet who are just outright lying about what Chappelle said and did. I don’t think that serves much of a purpose, and even though I agree that trans rights are important and trans people deserve extra consideration in matters like this, I am opposed to the tactic of strawmanning or misrepresenting an opponent even if that tactic comes from my side. For instance, someone said that Chappelle did nothing but rant about trans people for an hour and didn’t even tell any jokes. I’m sorry to say but this was an outright lie - a bizarre lie - as should be clear from what I’ve written above. “The Closer” is in fact full of jokes, but it is also complex and nuanced, and works on many levels, and if you can’t see through your anger or offense to understand what it is Chappelle is actually saying and doing and trying to get across, then I recommend you just switch it off and go do something else, rather than fabricate a story about it on the internet that misleads people and makes the world seem much worse for trans people than it actually is - because a world in which Netflix would actually air a comedy special in which a world-famous comedian rants and raves and incites hatred and violence against trans people for over an hour rather than telling any jokes is a terrible world, and also not at all the world that we live in. Things are bad enough without pretending they’re worse to get the dopamine hit of spreading your outrage across twitter. I respect an honest difference of opinion, but I don’t respect a lie.
Ultimately, I think Chappelle’s message is one of solidarity. That sounds crazy if you’ve only read the negative reviews, but it’s a theme he comes back to repeatedly. He wants minority groups to have solidarity with each other - not to compete to claw their way into the top spot so that they can be the ones with the power to oppress the others. He wants White activists to check their privilege when criticizing Black comedians. He wants the Left to stop eating its own. He wants all people to relate to each other on the level of a “human experience”, understanding that life is difficult for everyone and we’re all suffering. For some, the fact that Chappelle makes deeply offensive jokes while delivering this message will completely obscure or undermine the message. For others, it may enhance it. For me, the question of whether I can see past offense and judgment to relate to someone on a human level is not so black and white.