I watched The Closer, so you don’t have to.
There’s something bothering me about the discourse surrounding Dave Chappelle’s The Closer. It’s the implication that his friendship with late transgender comedian Daphne Dorman is necessarily a prop, because he says a lot of tired, bigoted shit about the transgender community. I think this claim comes from a desire — maybe conscious, maybe not — to flatten the reality of prejudice into something easier to rally people around; something black-and-white, something inhuman and unreal. Clean. Sterile. Prejudice is not clean, with sharp corners and neat outlines. Prejudice is a hot fucking mess. The more we flatten prejudice into an easily consumed cartoon of itself, the more poorly we equip those around us to recognize it in its complex, ugly reality. If you take nothing else away from this, take that.
I spent most of my childhood in a house shared with my uncles. One of my uncles is a white nationalist. I don’t mean, ‘he’s a racist white dude’, which is how I often see it used. He was knowingly, politically, a white nationalist. He had White Pride Worldwide and Christian Identity flags in his room. He believed that people of different ‘racial’ backgrounds needed their own state apparatus and territory, with obvious preference given to the interests of white people. I recently found out he was charged with making “terrorist threats” on multiple occasions, though I don’t know what the nature of said threats, was. I make these things clear so that you understand: I’m not talking about passive, unconscious racism, here. This is a person who hates.
He wasn’t talkative, so I was surprised to hear him regale his brothers with a brief tale of meeting a Black man, and having a great conversation with him. In short, he ran across an old Black nationalist (“dreds and everything!”) engaged in some street proselytizing. Things started off on an understandably contentious footing, but the two of them got to talking, and even sat down together on a bench nearby. My uncle reported that with the vital exception of his beliefs being about whites, and the other man’s beliefs being about Blacks, their ideologies were nearly identical. “He was a lot like me,” he said. “We both agreed our people shouldn’t live next to each other, for about the same reasons.” Supposedly, the two of them shared a laugh about whether members of the two ethnostates could visit each other, you know, for tourism.
“If he wasn’t Black, we’d be buddies.” My uncle seemed enthused about the guy, about his mere existence.
My uncle’s interaction with a member of a group he despised and wanted to disenfranchise is an extreme example, but speaks to a kind of prejudice I think most of us have encountered but is rarely articulated. It’s the kind of prejudice where you at once openly hold damaging, unkind beliefs about a group, and are able to “forgive” these so-called realities — at least for a while. Group stereotypes are akin to an individual’s bad habits; one dismisses the sin of another’s group membership as if it were smoking, or spoiling movies. Which is to say: yes, I believe this negative stereotype is accurate, but the individual is fantastic otherwise, so I’ll just shrug it off if they manage to appeal to my humanity, and I, to theirs. Yes, he’s Mexican, but at least he doesn’t slam my car doors. She’s transgender, but she’s really funny and I don’t think the things she says are trite. That’s Dave Chappelle. If a white nationalist who knows he hates Black people, and would happily see them vanish from the Earth, can sit down and have a friendly chat with a Black nationalist and vice-versa, Dave Chappelle can, without question, really be friends with a transgender person. Prejudice and fondness are not mutually exclusive. Humans are not that simple.
Are you saying that Dave Chappelle is as morally reprehensible as an ethnonationalist? No. I genuinely do not think Dave Chappelle hates transgender people as individuals, or as a group. I don’t think he believes straight and gay, cisgender and transgender, should not interact. Still, he has a bunch of bullshit beliefs about transgender people, and confirmation bias has led him to believe that these negative stereotypes are an unbiased reality that connotes neither hate nor love; it just is. It is very possible for a transgender person to subvert that reality, just as anybody can subvert expectations. His problem here isn’t about the individual, per se; it’s something about the culture that creates the “reality” Chappelle believes in. Someone like my uncle actually hates the group they are prejudiced against, in addition to believing that a bunch of bullshit about that group is “reality”. Even though he met a Black man he vibed hard with, the intensity of his political hatred prevented them from ever being friends. So, no, I am not saying that-thing-above. I think, instead, that Dave Chappelle is applying the logic that’s served him best as a comedian over the years.
Dave Chappelle is 48 years old. He’s been a professional comedian since at least 1993 — that’s almost 30 years of comedy. Much of said comedy has been ethnic and racial observations, often focusing on power dynamics between oppressor and oppressed. He is well-motivated and well-trained to find, simplify, and share these observations with others. He uses the same strategy pretty much everyone does when they try to understand and convey complex social dynamics: stereotypes. Dave Chappelle’s comedy banks on the acceptance of stereotypes, especially the unspoken assertion that stereotypes contain a socially unacceptable, but widely understood and agreed upon, truth. This man is a stereotype machine. The key to his success in the past was that he had such a flexible and incisive grasp on stereotypes about his subject matter, and could deploy them in ways that felt fresh and revelatory. The Closer is a logical evolution of his work; the technique has not changed. His fondness, or lack thereof, of his targets hasn’t changed. The problem is a lack of knowledge of the new subject matter. Whereas his previous work was largely derived from a lived experience of being a Black man entangled in countless power dynamics with everyone around him, The Closer attempts to use established technique to comment on an experience he has not lived — rendering the results anything but fresh, or revelatory. Because he lacks the knowledge, he lacks the range to artfully configure relevant stereotypes. Chapelle’s output on the subject of trans people is grade school level basic bitch observation at best; wildly off-base and willfully ignorant Just Because he Can, People will Still Laugh, at worst. All of it lacks self-awareness, despite efforts to achieve the opposite effect. Dave Chappelle does not know that he doesn’t know enough to effectively make Chappelle-style jokes about transgender people. If I had to bet, I’d wager he is sure he knows all he needs to, because a) his understanding of the transgender experience is one-dimensional, and b) such is the nature of bigotry. He has bigotried himself into bad comedy. In case it was in question: yes. He is bigoted towards transgender people. No, it does not mean he hates transgender people, though I’d argue that whether you “hate someone or not” is less consequential than whether you’re out there shit-talking them or not. He is a bigot, and he is a lesser comic for that limitation. It is what it is.
Dave Chappelle’s The Closer: 2.5/10
If you like spoken word personal essays, The Moth’s archives are a better bet all around — yes, even in terms of ha-has. I did not emit a single ha-ha during The Closer. Simply put, it’s just not funny. Is it that offensive? I felt I’d very much heard worse. To me, this was insults for babies, less intense than what you likely encounter on any given day on the Internet. Dave Chappelle and clout-chasing thinkpiece grifters have come together from opposite sides of the TERF divide to make the show seem like it’s doing something way more meaningful OR offensive than it is. Everybody… wins?
There is nothing to be gained from watching this special unless you’re doing a thesis on this kind of thing. Contemplating what’s going on in Dave Chappelle’s head is more entertaining and thought-provoking than the show itself. It has neither quality. The bar is on the ground. Sea level.
The ‘Space Jews’ joke was super awkward. I am not even Jewish.
