Early in “The Dreamer,” Dave Chappelle’s new Netflix special, the audience reacts deliriously to the first of his many jokes about LGBTQ people. Surveying the uproar he’s created, Chappelle exclaims, “Here we go!”
Really? Here? Again?
Why repeatedly antagonize a minority group that already encounters every form of discrimination and has begged him to stop?
Since his 2015 “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” the famed comedian has consistently used his Netflix specials to poke fun at those he calls “the alphabet people.” With every subsequent special — from "The Age of Spin" in 2017 to “Sticks and Stones” and “Equanimity” (also both 2017) to 2020’s “The Closer” — Chapelle has cast aspersions on this community. Each performance harks back to the previous performances’ controversies. To consume Chappelle’s art is to be consumed by the controversies triggered by Chappelle’s art!
And controversies there are! For nearly a decade, the virtuoso comic has been embroiled in countless scrums and running battles with the LGBTQ community. In “The Dreamer,” Chappelle shows no sign of surrender, let alone growth or wisdom born of experience.
Instead, he goes all in. He goes all out, he doubles down on a fight he clearly relishes. But it leads me to ask: Why repeatedly antagonize a minority group that already encounters every form of discrimination and has begged him to stop?
I have no definitive answer, just hunches. But all of my hunches lead me to the same conclusion: Chappelle’s anti-LGBTQ provocations are changing his comedy, his audience, and maybe even Chappelle himself.
Let’s begin with the joke that got us going in “The Dreamer.” The late Norm MacDonald, we are told, had invited Chappelle to the filming of the movie "Man in the Moon," in which Jim Carrey played cryptic comedy icon Andy Kaufman. To Chappelle’s dismay, Carrey remained steadfastly in character while on set.
Chappelle sighs, “I was very disappointed because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey and I had to pretend he was Andy Kaufman all afternoon. It was clearly Jim Carrey. I could look at him and clearly see it was Jim Carrey.” Which brings us to the punchline: “That’s how trans people make me feel.” His audience in stitches, off Chappelle goes.
Maybe Chappelle traffics in homophobic and transphobic humor because it’s profitable.
Soon thereafter, he intimates that he wants “to repair my relationship with the transgender community, ‘cause I don’t want them to think that I don’t like them.” The reparation in question consisted of writing a play: “Cause I know that gays love plays. It’s a very sad play, but it’s moving. It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, ‘n-----.’ It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play, she dies of loneliness ‘cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. It’s sad.”
Sad indeed is Chappelle’s (disingenuous) revelation that he plans to abandon anti-trans humor and open a new comedic front: jokes about people with physical disabilities. These bits are disturbingly evocative of Donald Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter. He uses the balance of his time to observe that his assailant at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022 was outraged over his jokes targeting bisexuals.
So no, Chappelle was not sincere when he sighed: “I’m not f---ing with those people anymore ... I ain’t saying s--- about trans people. Maybe three or four times tonight, but that is it. I’m tired of talking about them.”
The truth is, he can’t stop talking about them. The question remains: Why?
Maybe Chappelle traffics in homophobic and transphobic humor because it’s profitable. He may have been “canceled” for doing so. But as I have said again and again, established artists are, commercially speaking, indestructible. What Chappelle may have learned is that his audience hasn’t diminished because of his various cancellations. Instead, his audience has simply changed and perhaps even grown. So why not stoke controversy? It’s good for business.
Another explanation is that Chappelle has an issue, even an obsession, with nonheterosexual people. In spite of frequent claims of being an LGBTQ ally, he’s really more akin to a religious conservative. If so, the star comedian is speaking his truth as he punches down (which, Chappelle claims in “The Dreamer,” he loves to do). Better yet, he can frame the backlash to his truth as viewpoint discrimination, an assault on free speech.
A more charitable reading of Chappelle’s anti-LGBTQ onslaught is that he wishes to make a larger point about comedy and identity. Chappelle might be saying that jokes are simply jokes. Far from being punches, he may be suggesting they are harmless communications to make people laugh. No one should let themself be victimized by a mere gag (earlier in the special, Chappelle lauded Chris Rock for not playing Will Smith’s victim). Like a tall jocular Yoda dropping hard truths on the LGBTQ community, Chappelle simply wants to say, “Buck up! Don’t be so frail that words spoken by the likes of me hurt you.”
I’m not sure which of these explanations account for Chappelle’s very studied preoccupation with LGBTQ people. Maybe all are true, or partly true, at once. I would, however, note that his preoccupation correlates with what has become a puzzling staple of his act: self-absorption.
There’s a megalomaniacal dimension to “The Dreamer” (a tendency already irritatingly obvious in “What’s In a Name”). The new special begins with a not-unpretentious epigraph from Henry David Thoreau about following one’s dreams and attaining “a success unexpected.”
By performance’s end, Chappelle reflects to a subdued audience about how he is living his dream. The closing-credit montage, set to Aloe Blacc’s “The Man,” visually imparts a unified message: Chappelle has made it. Chappelle is beloved by many famous, cool people. Chappelle is — as he (and Kevin Hart) affirmed elsewhere — the GOAT.
For some, however, that might stand for “Greatest Of All Transphobes.” To which I would add that there is nothing more detrimental to an artist than to celebrate their own greatness within their own work. Art isn’t tennis or boxing. In the aesthetic realm, there’s no champion. Just as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of truly sublime jazz bassists, there are innumerable comic geniuses, of which Chappelle is undeniably one.
Are these two data points — anti-LGBTQ provocations and narcissism — linked? If they are, Chappelle might consider abandoning both. If not, his audience will continue to change, along with his legacy. He’ll be remembered as a Punch-Down Prince, a mean-spirited comic who couldn’t fathom the pain his talents created.