Before I start the main subject of this blog, let me tell you a couple of stories. I’ll tie up in the end, I promise.
The first story is about my mom. Now in her mid 80s, she’s now at the point where we talk about the same half dozen or so topics nearly every time. One topic is about race. Whenever something happens in the news where people of color are fighting for their rights, she tells the same story. She lives in a retirement community. In that community lives a Black woman. To hear my mom tell it, everybody loves this Black woman and she loves everybody else. She is just the nicest person. Because of that, my mom can’t understand why people still talk / protest about racism. After all, she has a Black friend that she just loves. Doesn’t that mean that racism is no longer an issue?
The second story is about Louis CK’s downfall. I’m sure that everybody knows the story, but a quick recap is that he invited a couple of young, aspiring female comedians to his room. He then stood in front of the door and asked if it was OK for him to jerk off in front of them. Without really waiting for them to process what was happening, he proceeded to do so. After he finished, he stepped aside and let them go. There’s so many things wrong with that situation. One of the biggest things is the massive power imbalance in the room. There was Louis, at the time the king of comedy. On the other side, there were two young women just starting out. He could, from his perch, go pretty far in making or destroying their careers. When he asked for their consent, the power imbalance of that relationship dictated that consent couldn’t really be given.
OK, now onto the blog post subject. I just watched Dave Chappelle’s last special, The Closer. As usual, Chappelle is clever, topical, and amusing.
If you aren’t aware of his more recent comedic history, he has been the subject of controversy for his comments around the trans community. Fair to say, his jokes certainly flirt with, if not jump over, the boundary of appropriate and good taste. For many comedians, finding that limit and then exceeding it is kind of the point. If a comedian pokes at something and it reacts, odds are that the comedian will keep poking it. So it goes with the trans community. The more that they accuse him of being trans phobic, the more that he feels obligated to keep going at them.
In many ways, this is a war with no end. The trans community will never not react to what they think are trans phobic comments. At this point of his career, Chappelle is, unless he starts reading Mein Kampf on stage, probably uncancellable. He has no further career mountains to climb and he already has more money than what he knows to do with.
Many of his comments / jokes are trenchant. Regarding feminism, it is a fair point that the leadership is biased towards white women. The white members of the gay community can always, in certain situations, make use of their white privilege.
In the last ten or fifteen minutes of his act, he discussed a deep friendship that he established with a trans woman. Herself an aspiring comedian, she would attend his shows and would always respond positively. Eventually, she showed up enough times that Chappelle took notice of her and they struck up a relationship. By the end, he was offering her opportunities to open for him and to mentor her. Not only did she not have problems with his trans jokes but she enjoyed them. The story ends tragically. The closing was the emotional heart of the act.
Here’s the thing. As I was listening to this emotionally affective story, I kept thinking about my mom. Was Chappelle really saying that he had a trans friend, and since she didn’t have any problem with his jokes that trans phobia is somehow not real or has been solved? Or that because this one trans woman enjoyed his jokes that that somehow inoculated Chappelle from criticism from the trans community at large?
Also as I was listening, I was thinking of Louis CK. Here is a woman just starting out in the field of comedy. By Chappelle’s own words, he offered her the opportunity to open for him when she had only had less than ten previous stage appearances. He claimed to be, with ample justification, the GOAT of comedians. In the field of comedy, it’d be hard to imagine a greater power imbalance than that of quite possibly the greatest comedian of all time to a completely unknown, novice comedian. Was there any way that, if she was offended by his jokes, that she would have felt safe letting him know? If she’d been offended and told him, would he have been so generous in offering up these great opportunities for advancement?
Here’s also the thing. Chappelle is a really brilliant comedian. Could he have told this story knowing that a good chunk of the audience would have come away with my impression? Is the fact that it made me think these thoughts actually what he was striving for?
And is that the irony? That Dave Chappelle, a Black man, who I’m sure has seen the I’ve got a Black friend racism up close and personal and even today probably regularly experiences power imbalances just due to the fact of being a Black man, chose to close his act (and apparently he’s not doing another special for some time to come) demonstrating that exact same behavior to a different historically marginalized and oppressed community? I don’t know.
He did say that he will never do another trans joke. I hope that he stays true to that commitment. I think that he’s taken it as far as it can go.
dorkenstein 