Has anyone thought about slipping Dave Chappelle some fresh material? Maybe “The Official Polish Joke Book” or “101 Uses for a Dead Cat”?
I can see him now, paging through old “Garfield” paperbacks, trying to come up with ideas: “Man, people really hate Mondays. Write that down!”
I said this on the bird site years ago, but it bears repeating, especially since I’ve deleted my presence there. I was a big Dave Chappelle fan, and I especially admired the fact that he was willing to walk away from his Comedy Central show when he felt it was becoming unhealthy. That took guts.
Watching his descent into being a right-wing troll is sad. It’s a little bit pathetic. Congratulations, Dave: You now have One Joke.
His latest special is another jeremiad against transgender people. He also takes shots at the disabled. I’m not going to link to it; no need to give him the clicks and the attention.
One of the interesting things about Chappelle is that he famously relocated to a farm outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio, in order to regain some sense of privacy and avoid the spotlight.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Yellow Springs, which is the home of Antioch College and a pretty good public radio station, WYSO, which I’ve toured.
Yellow Springs is also a very liberal and gay-friendly town. It’s an oasis of tolerance in a part of Ohio that’s otherwise deeply MAGA.
So Dave Chappelle is basically deliberately picking a fight with his neighbors. But this isn’t the only fight that he’s picked with them. During the COVID lockdown, he also started holding “socially distanced” concerts on his farm, which was a really nice gesture, except that he didn’t tell the people on the surrounding farms, who rightly got bugged by the noise and the traffic.
Chappelle also blocked a plan to bring 140 units of affordable housing to Yellow Springs, threatening to pull his investments in several proposed businesses if the local governments approved a developer’s plans. He has since bought the vacant property.
When we were in Yellow Springs in 2022, I saw Chappelle standing in front of a bookstore, talking to a group of people, while wearing a shirt advertising his own concert tour. (So much for wanting to stay inconspicuous.) I thought about going over to shake his hand so that I could at least say I’d met him, but decided against it.
He’s become a crank. And like I said, as a fan (I guess, former fan), it makes me sad.
When I posted something about this on Facebook, a friend who’s retired from the U.S. Army said, “I had the privilege of watching Bob Hope when I was deployed. He told many jokes over nearly two hours and there wasn’t a single racial one in the mix. Were comedians just better 50 years ago?”
Well, Lord knows Bob Hope stayed well past his prime, so I don’t know that I’d hold him up as an exemplar.
I don’t think comedians were better. Plenty of them did lean on ethnic stereotypes and anti-gay stereotypes. I can remember Johnny Carson and others doing “Puerto Rican” jokes and imitating gay people by mincing around and letting their wrists go limp. Those days are best left in the past.
But I do think comedians needed to have broader appeal. There were only three TV networks and a limited number of radio stations. Being too outrageous or crude condemned you to playing crummy nightclubs and doing “party records,” like Redd Foxx and Rusty Warren.
Because there are so many outlets now — basically an unlimited number of TikTok, YouTube and Instagram “creators” — the only way to break away from the pack is to say and do terrible things. No one ever goes viral by being polite and nuanced.
Dave Chappelle either has a deep-rooted prejudice against transgender people — again, some of the very same people who he sees regularly on the streets of Yellow Springs — or he’s decided that the best way to break through the clutter and keep his name in the news is by being an asshole to them.
Maybe it’s a little bit of both. That’s his choice. My choice is to ignore him. Bob Hope may have overstayed his welcome, but he had a successful career for 60 years before he became irrelevant and a object of pity.
What’s Chappelle’s excuse?
Image credit. @nanoraptor.danamania.com
AH! Thank you. Will add that. Someone sent it to me and I lol’d. I should have reverse image searched it.