Dealing With Dave Chappelle
A Great Comic Can Also Be a Bigot
By Richard Goldstein
In the annals of black transgressive comedy, Dave Chappelle is distinct. His best work is profoundly insightful, in keeping with the masters of this tradition, such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Jerrod Carmichael. What makes Chappelle stand out in this storied company is his sadism. He targets the victims of bias: transpeople, white women grieving over Hillary Clinton’s loss, and now Jews. In a typical Chappelle rant, what begins as a trenchant critique of these groups veers toward cruelty.
I think this tendency is partly an expression of male revanchism, partly a product of racial rage, and partly a projection of paranoia. But paranoia can be the engine of a dynamic intelligence, and that’s amply true of Chappelle. Playing the role of avenging angel, he rails at LGBT people whom he believes are treated with much more sensitivity than blacks are. Richard Pryor did something similar when he attacked a largely queer audience for its failure to support the black struggle. But Pryor also revealed that he had sucked a cock. Chappelle never takes such risks. He stands like a sentinel of straight maleness, and when his targets react with venom, as transpeople did after he inveighed against gender fluidity in a Netflix special, he accuses them of trying to censor him. His tirades on sex and gender are a classic example of what the black activist Flo Kennedy called “lateral oppression,” and Chappelle traffics in it.
Take his routine on Saturday Night Live last week. It was a 15- minute monologue about the firestorm that greeted Kanye West’s Jew-baiting comments and Kyrie Irving’s promotion of an anti Semitic book. Chappelle’s response to these events wasn’t so different from his transphobic comments. He began with a nuanced critique of Jewish hyper-sensitivity, but then he noted the preponderance of Jews in Hollywood, making a joke out of people who won’t work on Rosh Hashanah, by referring to that holiday as “sha-na-na.” This is an anxious joke.
Even as Chappelle points out that African Americans have never been the agents of genocide against Jews, he ignores the violent attacks on Jewish people in which the perps were black men or boys with hatred on their minds. These incidents range from teenagers beating up Hasidim on the streets of Brooklyn to murderous sprees such as the ones that occurred at a kosher grocery in Jersey City and a Hanukkah party in Rockland County. There’s no evidence that anti-Semitic attitudes are more prevalent in the black community than in the rest of America — perhaps they are merely more publicized. But there is so little candor about this conflict that no one can say for sure why it exists. Chappelle aims to provide that candor, but even a visionary comic can spout hate speech.
When I hear him talk about Jews in Hollywood (“It’s a lot of Jews. I mean, a lot.”), I see a man who is uneasy because he has entered a milieu where influential people practice a tradition different from his own. Of course there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood — there always have been. Among the reasons why black artists have felt oppressed by the studio system, surely the celebration of a holiday with a Hebrew name is not the problem. But to reason past Chappelle’s hyperbole is to ignore the depths of the man, in whom tropes about Jews as unduly powerful and alien seem to be deeply lodged. There were several moments in his monologue when these primal impulses surfaced, none more ominously than when he thanked the people at SNL who support his right to speak his mind. Chappelle ended his performance with a wish that these allies don’t have “something taken away” from them, adding, sotto voce, “by whoever.” Since the point of his diatribe was to criticize the idea that Jews cannot be criticized, it was clear to me whom he meant.
Standup is a genre freighted with risk. Comics have been punched, threatened with death, and — famously — slapped onstage. Chappelle himself was attacked by an armed man. The threat of punishment and even violence have become hazards of the trade. There’s a real danger that the only form of radical comedy safe from cancelling will be trauma-trolling and self-deprecation (for men). But ruining people’s careers because they cross the line into aggression doesn’t remove the bigotry; if anything, it makes the accused artists seem heroic to their fans. It’s more effective — and justifiable — to respond by critiquing their critiques. That’s what I’ve tried to do in this essay. Are we dealing here with a Louis Farrakhan surrogate or a latter-day Lenny Bruce (who blithely used racial epithets to argue that they would lose their power if they were commonly spoken)? Bruce was dead wrong about that, but he was also a truth teller. What if Dave Chappelle is both?
One can be a great artist and a bigot at the same time — just read T.S. Eliot, among other anti-Semitic literary greats. The idea behind responding to Chappelle is not to cancel him, but to be prepared for what you are likely to get, and to understand the attitudes that inform the jokes. This is as true when it comes to the women Chappelle calls bitches, and to transpeople who are the butt of his insults, as it is for Jews. If you shrug off these attacks or laugh uneasily, as the audience at SNL did, you have to face a question: Are you colluding with hate? And if you tolerate his biases against Jewish people while demanding that those who use racist language be banished, what does that say about the anti-Semitism within you?
Dave Chappelle must struggle to reconcile his imagination with the various tyrannies of our time. It!s not an easy task, but it’s his job. Perhaps it would help him find that balance if we all understood that hating Jews is not a black problem. It’s a Western problem, a bloody marker of the boundary between purity and pollution. That’s why, every time Chappelle rants about Jews or queers, and every time he touts Donald Trump, the response should be, “Welcome to whiteness.”
This piece originally appeared in First of the Month: A Journal of the Radical Imagination
