Likes: 
Faceplams: He went in. 100%. Not gonna lie a few parts had me on edge. Overall, god bless this straight savage.
Active Member
He went in. 100%. Not gonna lie a few parts had me on edge. Overall, god bless this straight savage.
BADGERS
Old man yells at cloud
Active Member
Was already saying this when he stuck by Louis CK, but fuuuck Dave Chappelle. This latest special just shows how out of touch he is now. Of course, his fans will eat it up because they eat up everything he does.
Active Member
Yeah it's weird what that much money does to a person. It's a larger meta conversation but basically you get to a point where you lose the frame of reference that made you connect with the people you're talking to and about and you just end up talking at them.
edit: Also "I'm team terf" isn't a great look at all.
Last edited by allegate; 10-08-2021 at 10:03 AM.
BADGERS
It's such a frustrating shift from the comedy that put him over the top on his show and his other stand up, which was a lot more about being weird and very rarely about being shocking.
Banned
(Unused symbol)
Cite resources. Here are a couple:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.e...press-release/
https://www.hrc.org/resources/hate-crimes
Active Member
There's always humor to be found in literally anything. Humor helps people cope with reality in really bad situations sometimes and can be very moving and helpful. But it stops being humor when you are using said humor just to specifically target a group of people that are already actively facing harm and violence for no good reason. Dave has said some REALLY funny shit about some really controversial things before, but it always worked because it usually was coming from a place of earnestness and understanding.
This... Dave hasn't any earnestness nor understanding on the situation. He's just an old man screaming insults at something he doesn't understand because he's too uncomfortable with it to even try. It's sad, man. It's not funny, it's not edgy, it's not groundbreaking, it's not even accurate. It's just straight up insulting bullshit.
Active Member
Let me guess: "Trans women are men and there's nothing you can do do change that." Right?Originally Posted by grime_z
Just come right out and say you're a bigot and get it over with.
Administrator
Are you really going to do that here?
"Fuck anyone that disagrees" is not the road to choose on a discussion forum, but since you've made it clear that your mind is made up and that you're only interested in the details that back your world view, do everyone a favor, save all of us a lot of time, and just stop there.
And to everyone else, don't engage with this kind of edgelord bullshit. It's a cry for attention, not an invitation for thoughtful discussion. I'm sorry to see it happening here.
Any further transphobic diatribes will be met with the banhammer. Maybe just a tap, maybe a proper whack - let's not find out.
Active Member
The amount of people who defend it as "just jokes" is what really pisses me off. There's always an element of truth in comedy. What's disturbing people isn't the jokes. It's what's underneath them.
BADGERS
Well we've seen it here too, now I guess.
The thing that really sucks to see is the retcon on this. Dave wasn't always like this. Shock value was never his venue. Even when he chose provocative topics he was never going in that direction. This turn on the last several years is new.
Throbbing Member
At the risk of jumping into a topic that's a bit hotter than I usually like to touch on this board...
I watched the special and I actually thought it was a failure. I won't repeat what others here are saying but I'd just like to add that I thought it was a failure because in order for these types of jokes to work, the logic behind them needs to be rock solid. And it just wasn't at all. I remember in one of the bits he was eyerolling someone for telling him gay and trans people have been oppressed for decades. It seemed to imply that their struggle to fit in isn't as important as black peoples and that his people's struggles go back centuries (which they do). The problem here is that gay and trans people have also existed since there have been humans, right? And most societies have been pretty bad to them along the way. So what the fuck is his point in any of this? Am I misinterpreting something here? The whole special was filled with moments like this where it lacked a point as well as a sound premise, so the jokes fell flat.
That's not to say there weren't any good points made at all during the hour but it was very spotty to me. And just for the record, I do think sjw nonsense goes too far a lot of times in our culture and that it actually further divides and encourages people to think of themselves in groups or "us vs them" when in the long run we need to be looking at everyone as just human.
I've also always been a fan of Dave and I'm pretty much impossible to offend, myself. I'll still listen to music or specials by people who are "cancelled" if I deem it ok for me. That said, I can see why people here are upset about this one. I don't think any group of people should be above jokes or criticisms, everyone should be fair game. There's nothing wrong with punching down imo. The problem here is that if you're going to do that in standup, it has to make sense. Your logic has to be bulletproof.
So while others are saying he failed with this one because he's a bigot. Idk, maybe. But I'm saying he failed to make a good comedy special.
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As a cis white dude, that reads as "our struggle has been out in the open for centuries due to our skin color" and "your struggle is less-than because you could just bottle it up and live as a cis person...this is a choice you are making". Of course I think that's nonsense and is a product of not caring enough to empathize with other marginalized people and learn how their struggle is different than your own.
We constantly divide ourselves into groups in society. Ethnic pride days, social clubs, sporting affiliations...we CONSTANTLY and willingly do this. "Us vs them" is not the crux of it. That is reductivism and is only done by the group looking to further exclude those who are marginalized. It's done on purpose to denigrate a call for equality while keeping a veil of objectivity.
Throbbing Member
Yeah, that's probably a better job of paraphrasing the bit I was talking about. That's pretty much how I read it as I watched. And this is the exact sort of thing I mean when I say the premises in his jokes weren't very sound in this special. I mean, imagine you're a gay person living in colonial America for example. You're caught by the town preacher with another person of the same sex. Ok, then what? Is the fact you happen to be white going to save you? Fuck no, your life is most likely going to end.
Ok, now take the counter example, you do hide your whole life and no one ever truly knows who you are. You can't even come out to other people you suspect may be like minded because if you guess wrong it would mean your life. And even if you are successful, how is a life lived that way free in any way?
He seems to be completely discounting those possibilities. And they were occurring right alongside slavery and social injustice. So, again, what in the fuck was he trying to accomplish here?
Well, I think we can distinguish true marginalization from the examples you cite here. Social clubs vary, sports fans can go to road games and root for the road team, anyone can attend a pride parade. For example, I arbitrarily happen to be white and straight but I am welcome to attend a gay pride parade.
Those aren't the sorts of sjw situations that concern me, in fact I think those sorts of things are great.
Now look at the counter example. A white pride parade. They're exclusionary. What I'm getting at is that we need to be careful to not become what we fight against. We shouldn't make an effort to divide people unnecessarily and some of this special read to me like it was going there, and for seemingly no reason. Other parts seemed to be saying the opposite. It was mixed signals all over.
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I'm not comparing social-recreational divisions to marginalizations of Black or LGBTQ people. We put ourselves in these categories of varying degrees all the time, happily and willfully, so what is it about Black or Brown or LGBTQ causes that makes people say "well no wait a minute, this is a bridge too far?" What I'm saying is the often-trotted rebuttal of "we shouldn't divide ourselves, we should be one people" purposefully reduces the call for equal treatment and rights by those marginalized. It skips over the specific justified grievances and focuses on the end result, which is useless because it doesn't address the root causes. White nationalism does this purposefully because on it's face it seems like a rational opinion and one "normies" can adopt and use without much worry for being called out.
But this is veering away from the special so I'll stop there.
Active Member
24.24.1.1397
Pay wall, got a tl;dr or paste?
Active Member
I try really hard not to rip-off content creators... that being said, I don't pay and I can read the article fine (not even one of those "This is your x article of the month, you have y more").
FATUM NOS IUNGET
Pretty edgy.
Administrator
when i clicked the link in tapatalk, it asked for a log in. but i went to the browser and was able to read it fine there.
it’s a brilliant analysis. dead on. the tl;dr version is chappelle is an elitist homophobe/transphobe.
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tempus est umbra in mente
For me, the problem here goes way past the notion that I’m offended or that I’m too much of a hypersensitive crybaby to handle the jokes that so malign my world view… it’s more that the whole thing is pretty much an unfunny joyless rant, and I’m sorry, but if Dave Chappelle wants to put out a special where he moans about how he has a shitty sort of intolerance going on, fine, but then you’d hope if I can “take a joke” then he can handle some criticism.
EDIT: just read that NYT article, and that really does sum it up.
Last edited by Jinsai; 10-14-2021 at 10:11 AM.
God is an American
I read the Roxanne Gay piece last night, the punch line is that when Chappelle talks about "my people" it's clear from the end-credits montage that he means: rich, comfortable, famous, powerful people. Not marginalized ones.
Active Member
I've not watched the show, but here's kinda what I think.....
If you're gunna make fun of someone (or group of someones), it's OK, if they're loved and supported. Like, I can make fun of my kids, because we take care of each other and we have a healthy relationship. CIS-gendered, hetero white people like me, we're really well loved and supported by society as a whole, so knock yourselves out with making fun of us, that's fine.
But if we look at societies relationship with LGBTQ+ people, we've been killing them for their sexuality and gender for a long time. Telling them to hide it, making it illegal for them to get married. Vilifying them. There's not a healthy relationship here to poke light-hearted humour at. If someone beats you up, makes fun of you for the thing they beat you up for, then blames you for being upset when they're making fun of you for the thing they beat you up for, that's an abusive relationship, not a healthy one. There's no room to make fun of someone here.
BADGERS
I keep seeing people back away from saying they're offended and I also see this with "I'm not afraid of covid," etc. And like.. it's ok to be offended by horrible shit and afraid of scary shit, y'all
Active Member
That's exactly it. Punching down in comedy has always been lame, and Chappelle probably knows this, but he's afraid of being irrelevant. That's why he trots out all this "edgy" material, because it gets people talking. Unfortunately, we end up talking about him and not the actual issues.
By the way, here's a good Twitter thread written by a trans Netflix employee. Pretty much sums up the issue.
Last edited by BRoswell; 10-14-2021 at 07:33 PM.
Active Member
For reasons that are neither here nor there, I stopped following Chappelle around the time it seemed like his specials were falling out of the sky. By that point he was well settled on Mt. Olympus of comedy and there were a lot of up and coming comedians that felt a lot more fresh.
When this new special came out, it was impossible not to run into publicized push back against him and Netflix. I decided to check it out and see what was what. After reading the NYTimes piece I was ready for an out of touch comedian doubling down on his own ignorance. I was ready not to like it.
My take away is that it really wasn't that. Not everything landed, but the Chappelle that I saw had a lot more nuance (than expected) addressing a situation to the best of his understanding and through his own lens of experience, while still trying to make it funny. It was after all a comedy special. I have separate thoughts on what his motivations are or aren't in regards to specific topics. I understand what about it some have problems with but it is hardly the hate crime that others might have you believe. Current state outrage is a type of theatre in and of itself.
Watching this special in a vacuum, Chappelle is still a great story story teller and is operating on a level rarely seen from his peer group. He is a little high on his own supply trying to still get mileage of the the whole "I walked away from 50 million megadollars" bit. Space Jews made me laugh.
Active Member
That's the problem. He doesn't get a pass for being ignorant and misinformed.
Active Member
Very well put! What infuriates me with this kind of talk (from Chappell, not you, obviously) is that it conveniently forgets that there are trans people of color, too! There are black people in the queer community, what a shocker!
Even if I look past the fact that I 100% disagree with him on the issue at hand, the fundamental problem with this special is that he's punching down! Going after people who are more vulnerable than you is always a recipe for shitty comedy, because it's inherently unfunny.
This was just a lazy kneejerk reaction to the bogeyman of the comedy word, the dreaded "cancel culture", because "you can't make jokes about anything anymore", can't call people fags and jerk off in front of your female colleagues... boo-fuckin-hoo
Last edited by hellospaceboy; 10-16-2021 at 12:08 PM.
Stubby Member
And the best part is that cancel culture would never cancel someone like Chappell. Dumb masses still aren't able to use critical thinking and see that nearly none of the folk who make money/fame/notoriety from crying about CC get cancelled at any point. Even fucking Kevin Spacey and Bill Cosby is back! It's not so much bogeyman as a full blown myth as this point. Consequences don't exist for the rich and powerful.
Last edited by Something Underneath; 10-16-2021 at 12:28 PM.
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