TWIBS: Dave Chappelle Tells First Good Joke in 20 Years
Lamenting the way Republicans have “weaponized” jokes about trans people, David Chappelle hilariously insists he’s not to blame.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Dave Chappelle resents Republicans weaponizing his jokes about transgender people.
I know you must be laughing as hard as I was when I read the Variety article on Wednesday, so I’ll give you a minute. Feel free to look away from your monitor, tablet or phone (or newspaper, if you’re subscribed to Assigned Media Print+, a thing that doesn’t exist because I just made it up right now) and guffaw to your heart’s content. You can chortle, you can giggle, you can even have a hearty chuckle.
Do I have time for an aside about how much I hate when people write out laughter as “bahaha”? I mean, who begins a laugh with a B? No, sorry, we’re going to run out of space on this webpage if I get too deep in the weeds on this one. Let’s move along.
If you don’t know much about Chappelle, that’s okay. He was a very famous comedian in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, was briefly driven insane by his success and vanished for a while, then reappeared to explain himself to Oprah. For the most part, Dave failed to recapture the public’s interest in the way he did with his eponymous Chappelle’s Show, but he has seen plenty of success by way of three mildly funny Netflix specials that, surprise, feature a whole slew of extremely unpleasant jokes about trans women.
I don’t know what it is about older comedians going on right-wing bents, but I know that Dave has long taken umbrage with critics of his “jokes” about trans people. In Variety, he describes being set up by Lauren Bobert for a snarky anti-trans social media selfie, and says he resents the Republican party for “[running] on transgender jokes,” which he describes as a “weaponized” version of his comedy.
His comedy, he insists, was not weaponized.
I don’t know that it’s worth anybody’s time for me to explain, in depth, why Dave’s “jokes” about trans people are harmful. Instead, I want to reference two very good essays about his behavior with regards to trans people, and how it has done direct harm to other people.
In 2018, Tyler Foster wrote about his experience reaching out to Dave about his (then, newly) hurtful material, and likely being publicly mocked by the comedian as a result. He describes a show he attended in 2016 where Dave rails against Caitlyn Jenner, which I generally support, but for the sin of transitioning, not like… straight up murdering somebody with her car. Apparently, Dave found the idea of once having respected a trans woman disgusting, argued that trans people don’t have it as bad as Black people (never mind that plenty of trans people are themselves Black), and colored his tirade with the word tranny. Which is only funny when hot t-girls say it, Dave, to be clear.
You can use the word again when you transition, buddy.
Tyler talks about his earliest impressions of Dave being formed by the 2006 documentary Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, in which Dave hosts a secret party with his friends and neighbors. This, he says, was in stark contrast to the Dave Chappelle he endured on stage in 2016, whose material he describes as “regressive, exclusionary, and cruel.”
So, Tyler wrote to Dave, hoping to engender some empathy for trans folks, and maybe get him to stop saying tranny so much. Believe it or not, Dave wrote back; he insisted that his material, while potentially insensitive, was not malicious. He thanked Tyler for his gentle criticism, and even said that Tyler’s “friends in the transgender community” were lucky to have an advocate like him.
Unfortunately, Dave went on to work Tyler’s letter into his bits about trans women, and even began to misrepresent Tyler as a white trans person who went to great lengths to get that letter to him… as opposed to a nonwhite cisgender man who just mailed it to the venue Dave was performing at in Portland. Tyler mentions that, in one of his Netflix specials, Dave defends his hurtful routines about trans women in the way that most “offensive” comedians do: by insisting that comedy is a necessarily deified act of rebellion, that comedians are bold and brave truthsayers, and that their First Amendment rights must never be impinged upon by the hoi polloi.
I’ll circle back to that idea.
The second essay about Dave is by Michael Hobbes, and it’s about Dave’s use of a real trans woman who he called his friend as a shield, and the fact that she took her own life, and Dave immediately blamed it on other trans people.
Daphne Dorman was a trans comedian who was invited to open for Dave, and later defended him to critics online. As Hobbes describes, Dorman received little to no visible backlash for her defense of Chappelle… but, after she took her life, Dave declared that she had been “dragged… all over Twitter, for days,” and suggests that this is the reason she committed suicide.
In reality, Dorman’s sisters say she struggled with PTSD as a result of a traumatic childhood. Her friend says that “the final blow” for Daphne was “a combination of her losing custody of her daughter, losing her job, and dealing with a lot of transphobic harassment on the streets of San Francisco.”
So, one of Dave’s key defenses of his material hinges on his friendship with trans comedian Daphne Dorman. I have a hard time believing that they were particularly good friends, when Dave rushed to weaponize her suicide in service to the public perception that his jokes about trans people are bigoted.
Dave abuses the memory of a dead trans friend. He tells his fans that he appreciates their critique, but goes on stage to perform more hurtful routines about trans people, where he recasts those critical fans as aggrieved trans folks, I guess so that he can construct some sort of terrible transphobic double decker sandwich. He’s transphobiamaxxing, as the kids say. Uh, I think. I think that’s what the kids say. I don’t know.
So, circling back to Dave’s feelings about comedic free speech. In Variety he says, “I’m not even mad [people] take issue with my work … What I take issue with is the idea that because they don’t like it, I’m not allowed to say it. Art is a nuanced endeavor. I have a belief that they are trying to take the nuance out of speech in American culture, that they’re making people speak as if they’re either on the right or the left.”
What I want to say, here, is: That’s a crock of shit, and you know it, Dave Chappelle. The kind of material he’s performed about trans people for years now—hateful, hurtful, and rooted in sharing a disgust reflex about trans women with a cisgender audience—has had an impact on the way Americans view and interact with trans people, whether he wants to believe it or not.
America is largely influenced by pop culture. Dave, like many of his peers, has leveraged his distaste for trans women to sell himself to an audience of people all too willing to think terrible things about us, because it’s cheap and it’s easy. When enough people punch down like this, it contributes in a negative way.
The actions of people like Dave Chappelle paved the way for people like Donald Trump to take away our civil liberties, and worse. If that upsets him enough to bitch and moan in the news about it, I happily invite him to shut the fuck up about my community forever.
