It’s the anxiety felt by many people who are frustrated by cancel culture and what they perceive as its policing of language and free speech. On one level, Chappelle’s anxiety here is deeply relatable. I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience.” Then he points out that he accepted her explicitly “because she didn’t say anything about pronouns” or make him feel like he was about to be “in trouble” for saying something wrong. Praising Dorman for her skills as a comedian and her good-natured attitude, he recalls Dorman telling him, “I don’t need you to understand me. In fact, in the moment where he comes closest to accepting trans identity, again using his friend Daphne as his lodestar, it’s the semantic argument that makes the crucial difference for Chappelle. Chappelle rarely acknowledges that these communities contain people of color instead, he frames the concerns of queer and genderqueer people - especially the linguistic arguments about pronouns, anatomy, and bodily functions that often arise from conversations about trans and nonbinary identity - as solely a product of white progressive hysteria gone mad. These are serious problems - but in contrast, he treats the equality movement among sexual and gender minorities as essentially shrill window-dressing. Chappelle gets close to lobbing a critique of social justice movements that mainly focus on aiding white people, but his analysis lacks nuance: He frames whiteness as the protective cover most gay and transgender people default to, ignoring Black trans people in the course of the show.Ĭhappelle repeatedly attempts to redirect the conversation back to concerns of Black oppression and violence against Black communities. “Gay people are minorities until they need to be white again,” he notes at one point.
Throughout The Closer, Chappelle argues - often savvily, if with glaring hypocrisy - that many queer and trans people enjoy white privilege, and that their white privilege makes them essentially more cosseted and protected than Chappelle and other Black men in America. Individual identity doesn’t work that way. Chappelle wants to make classes of oppression into a zero-sum game. But Chappelle seems to view that hurt, and even the immediate pain of his transphobic jokes, as a worthy trade-off. There’s no getting around the reality that transphobic rhetoric like Chappelle’s absolutely contributes to real-life harm. So perhaps the real question is, should trans people have to get over it? “Yes” seems to be the answer from The Closer, more or less. What we wind up with, then, is this: Yes, The Closer could cause real-world harm, but trans people will just have to get over it. In his defense of Chappelle, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos first said that he didn’t believe The Closer could cause any real-world harm, and then, after recanting that statement, said that trans people would simply have to deal with the special being on the platform. Trans people have expressed outrage at both Chappelle and Netflix for amplifying overtly transphobic and anti-scientific views about gender and trans identity. Chappelle’s use of Dorman as a kind of totem for the type of relationship he’d like to have with the trans community at large is both telling and confusing - not because of what it says about Chappelle and Dorman, but because of what it says about the nature of comedy and the nature of pain. Then he says, “As hard as it is to hear a joke like that, I’m telling you right now - Daphne would have loved that joke.”Īs I’ve attempted to grapple with the aims of Chappelle’s comedy, this line has stuck with me. Toward the end of Dave Chappelle’s incendiary Netflix standup special The Closer, he says something revealing about the fight he’s waged against trans people - a fight that’s drawn Netflix itself into the fray and which led to a walkout and protest against the company on October 20.Īfter discussing the death of his friend, a trans comedian named Daphne Dorman who Chappelle also mentioned in his previous special Sticks and Stones, Chappelle makes a joke where the punchline is to blatantly misgender her.