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DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BETRAYAL

Poet Saeed Jones used to consider himself a longtime fan of the comedian. But
Chappelle’s new Netflix special “The Closer,” which fixates on gay and trans
people, feels like a stab in the back.

By Saeed Jones

October 11, 2021
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Dave Chappelle's The Closer, 2021. Courtesy of Mathieu Bitton for Netflix
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You ever hear the one about the famous Black comedian who disappeared when he
realized the white people watching him were laughing a little too hard and
likely for the wrong reasons? Deal with white people long enough, especially the
ones who’ve enjoyed enough episodes of “The Wire” and Wu-Tang albums to believe
they’re in on the joke, and you can easily understand why Dave Chappelle walked
away from $50 million rather than tape a third season of Chappelle’s Show for
Comedy Central. He was fighting for his life.

In 2012, eight years into his absence from public life, it seemed like Chappelle
had won. When the journalist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah was working on her now
classic profile for The Believer, “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” she spotted him on
the street in Yellow Springs, Ohio. “Here Dave is just Dave,” she writes.
"Totally uninterrupted, unheckled, free to be himself, free to have a family,
and land, and time to recover. Time to be complicated, time to be a confessed
fan of fame who one day decided it was important to learn to be himself again."

It’s a beautiful moment, both because of the clarity with which Kaadzi Ghansah
saw Chappelle, and because the freedom he was able to attain, well, I want that
for all of us: the Black MacArthur Genius denied and then belatedly offered
tenure at a prestigious southern university; the older Black men I used to see
playing dominos on Saturday afternoons in Harlem; the ballroom legend performing
in Rihanna’s most Savage X Fenty’s show; my friends side-eyeing the white waiter
who mimicked our clapping as she approached our table with the check. We deserve
to be ourselves. We deserve to do whatever it takes to find our way back to
ourselves whenever the need may arise.

With the premiere of “The Closer,” Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, it’s
clear the comedian has done all that and more. “First of all, before I start, I
wanna say I’m rich and famous,” he smirks and announces at the top of the show.
But more than that, he looks good. He looks like someone who knows he’s doing
what he loves. I want that for all of us, too.

In the show’s opening minutes, under the auspices of updating the audience on
his pandemic experience — he got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine: “Give me the
third best option! I’ll have what the homeless people are having!” — Chappelle
makes it clear that, in addition to being entertaining, he’s out to test our
limits because, it becomes increasingly clear, he believes we need to have our
limits tested. A few breaths after likening his immune system fighting
coronavirus to Black people violently beating up Asian-Americans, Chappelle
surveys the gasping audience and says “It’s gonna get worse than that. Hang in
there; it’s gonna get way worse.”

And then it does. Discussing DaBaby, for example, Chappelle opines “In our
country, you can shoot and kill a n-gga but you better not hurt a gay person’s
feelings." Never mind that DaBaby’s onstage comments about AIDS at the Rolling
Loud festival were truly out of pocket, or that the apology that followed was
late and lackluster, or that DaBaby eventually took the apology back.

A few beats later, Chappelle declares "We Blacks, we look at the gay community
and we go “Goddamn it! Look how well that movement is going." Never mind that,
in addition to being both Black and gay, I also happen to live in the state of
Ohio, as does Chappelle himself, where our governor just signed a provision that
will allow doctors and other medical professionals to deny healthcare to LGBTQ
patients. As the activist Raquel Willis said on Twitter, “It’s convenient for
Black cishet male comedians to talk about LGBTQ+ folks as if our group is only
or even predominantly white. With that frame, they don’t have to contend with
how Black cishet folks often enact (physical and psychological) violence on
Black LGBTQ+ folks.”

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By the time Chappelle declares that “gender is a fact” and that he’s “Team TERF”
in solidarity with J.K. Rowling, I turned my television off because I wasn’t
having fun anymore. And part of freedom as I experience it is that I don’t owe
Dave Chappelle any of my time.

Maybe you watch comedy specials to endure them, but I watch them to have a good
time, and I stop watching them when that’s no longer the case. Chappelle argues
this makes me "too sensitive, too brittle"; I just think I have better things to
do than watch a standup set that could just as well have been a Fox News
special. As a gay Black man, even when I’m watching a comedy special, my
identity is inconveniently present. It’s so annoying; I asked my queerness to
chill in the other room so I could watch "The Closer" in peace, but no such
luck.

It’s clear that whatever the hell was going on in 2005, Chappelle intuited that
Hollywood was trying to kill him, literally or metaphorically, and I’m Black
enough to know exactly what that feels like. I cheered when he decided to save
himself instead. I cheered even louder when, having saved himself, he decided to
return to the stage. America might love a second-act; I love Black people who
get free.

Watching Chappelle contort himself to justify ashy ideas about gender, queerness
and identity is harrowing, because the only thing more brutal than someone
saying hurtful shit is someone saying hurtful shit moments after making you
laugh, moments after cracking you up in a way that’s both fun and deeply needed,
moments after making you feel like you all got free together. America has only
gotten better at trying to kill me. Laughter is no joke, which makes the
betrayal, years in the making at this point, all the more devastating. I feel
like a fool to have rooted for Dave Chappelle for so long. Things were easier
when the men who wanted to hurt me just said so at the jump.

Last weekend, I was bar-hopping in my neighborhood with friends. There was a
whole gang of us. White, Black, Persian, gay, straight, trans, moisturized,
un-moisturized, stoned, drunk and sober. And we were vibing. As we crossed the
street, colored by the sound of our laughter and the booze lacing our blood, we
were free as it’s possible to feel in these disjointed, apocalyptic days. And
then two Black men standing on the corner cat-called my friend. She kept her
eyes ahead, pretending like she didn’t hear them because a woman, but especially
a Black trans woman, can get killed for saying “no” to a man who has decided she
owes him her time. The men, standing on the same street I marched up and down
countless times last summer, chanting “whose streets? our streets!”, yelled
“That’s a MAN! That’s a MAN!” as we all walked away.

That’s the gag, Dave. I thought when you got free, if you decided to come back
to us, you’d find a way to help us feel more free too. I believe that’s what
laughter does. It loosens us up, helps us shake ourselves free. But watching you
spew bullshit just as hurtful as the words those men hurled at us last weekend,
I didn’t feel like I was being set free. I felt like I’d just been stabbed by
someone I once admired and now he was demanding that I stop bleeding.

Related: Dave Chappelle's Trans Comments in ‘The Closer’ Are Causing Ripple
Effects Through Netflix

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