Dave Chappelle speaks onstage during the 36th Annual Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse on Oct.30, 2021, in Cleveland, Ohio.According to Dave Chappelle , a lot of people want him canceled.Not me, though.What I want is for trans people to be able to claim the immensely observant and charismatic comic as a potent ally.That is just never going to happen, though.Last night at Chase Center in San Francisco, Chappelle and a phenomenal parade of his performer-friends premiered “Untitled Dave Chappelle Documentary,” a feature-length project filmed at a makeshift outdoor comedy venue in his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the first tentative emergence from post-COVID-19 lockdown.
The premiere had the atmosphere of a party — an incredible party, if one at which everyone’s cellphone went into a Yondr pouch for the full four-and-a-half hours.Jeff Ross opened, the magnificently raunchy Luenell followed, and after the film came a crescendoing series of East Bay musical legends: Goapele, Raphael Saadiq, Too Short and E-40 (plus Lil Jon).In between their short sets, Chappelle lashed out at his critics, bemoaning his alleged cancellation to a crowd of 18,000 fans then mocking the idea of getting canceled.And he lashed out at transgender people whenever he could.Three weeks into the controversy surrounding his intensely homophobic and transphobic Netflix comedy special “The Closer,” Chappelle remains the opposite of canceled.Still, the imbroglio has now included a joke apology, walkouts by Netflix employees, and an offer to meet with transgender advocates that may really have been a taunt.Famous people have rushed to his defense, as have at least a few LGBTQ+ comics and the family of Daphne Dorman, the late trans woman he mentions in “The Closer” who took her own life.
At Chase Center, there were no visible protests outside, and no discernible heckling inside.The attendees were Chappelle’s most devoted fans, eager to see his latest project.
Even the woman who got thrown out was a trans Chappelle supporter.Shot in the summer of 2020 while comic Michelle Wolf was living with the Chappelle family on an extended basis, “Untitled Dave Chappelle Documentary” is a slightly self-indulgent but ultimately winning look at the comic’s urge to connect his wit to social causes, namely the Black Lives Matter movement.Interspersed with street actions and other protests in Yellow Springs — a progressive enclave home to the ultra-lefty Antioch College, where Chappelle’s father was once dean of students — the film shows the hasty development of an unlawful performance space that brought a lot of joy during the worst summer of our lives.Scenes depicting the awkwardness of masking up or famous comics saying they haven’t performed in a while have about as much punch left in them as the tribulations of Carole Baskin.
But an inner circle that includes Mo Amer and “Chappelle’s Show” veteran Donnell Rawlings keeps it going, with brief cameos by everyone from Tiffany Haddish to local shop owners to Erykah Badu dancing on a tarmac.Michelle Wolf, who truly was canceled, comes off as a person in genuine crisis, and it seems as though her residency (in every sense) was beneficial.Watch this film and you will remember how good it felt to hug people in July 2020, while wishing you’d been there to see Chris Rock bomb.
“Untitled Dave Chappelle Documentary” even includes an antagonist, in the form of the local zoning inspector.Central Casting couldn’t produce a more ready-made cartoon villain than this high-maintenance, white hippie who looks a little like Kurt Vonnegut and seems sincere in his desire not to let Yellow Springs turn into an unaffordable resort town.
Chappelle et al.put up a fight, comparing their desire to spread joy during difficult times to the plot of “Footloose.” Who couldn’t root for them? Chappelle’s entire shtick — on screen as in real life — is about peace, mutual understanding and solidarity.And the man who famously walked away from many millions of dollars, spending years in the wilderness, has genuinely suffered for his work.Who would question the sincerity of someone who closes their documentary with “Why get up one at a time if we can’t get up together?” Yet a year-and-a-half later we have a different Chappelle, embattled and pugnacious.He’s not entirely changed; the pleas for the courage to be kind to one another are still there.But in “The Closer,” they’re interspersed with 75 minutes of sustained swatting at LGBTQ+ people in the form of low-wattage, unoriginal jokes about masculine lesbians and the like.
And at Chase Center, he simply could not lay off the supposed conspiracy to keep him down.Lashing out at a trans community that he insists is large and powerful is positively irresistible.The reason this sucks is because one of the best things LGBTQ+ people have had going for us is our enemies.They’re either uptight prudes or blatant hypocrites or all-around jerks who openly denigrate other marginalized communities, too.In Chappelle, we’re confronted by the world’s chillest transphobe, a party animal who’s also a TERF, unwilling to consider that his enormous appeal may actually be transferable to transphobia itself.
This is scary.
Dave Chappelle is an ultra-high-net-worth man role-playing the persecuted underdog and railing against an amorphous “they” in a way that gets entire arenas of people to jump to their feet.Now who else does that sound like? No matter how blessed you are with the common touch, when you’re famous and worth an estimated $50 million, you’ve exited the realm of the common man.If you can make E-40 appear out of a hat, or lure David Letterman and Chris Rock to rural Ohio to play before tiny crowds during a pandemic, you’re wielding power and influence on an extraordinary scale.No one alive can match Chappelle’s ability to make critics seem as strident as an out-of-touch zoning inspector.
I wish his enormous reservoirs of urgency and empathy extended just a little further out.Chappelle grasps humor’s power of catharsis like no one else, and I have no doubt he could be the cis-het comic who makes queer people laugh the hardest, if only he would bother to try.
Instead, he’s committed to his blinkered zeal, which essentially says, “LGBTQ+ people are nothing more than a subset of annoying, entitled white killjoys who invent grievances specifically to steal the political oxygen away from a cause that is dear to me, and I’m comfortable mocking you as humorless scolds, even though my enormous cultural cachet can do a lot of damage to real people.” In truth, a lot of white LGBTQ+ people are entitled oxygen hogs, and are pretty racist, too.But Blackness and queerness have been tethered together since long before Stonewall and the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot.Chappelle shows no interest in considering that.Consequently, his routines are starting to take on the brittleness of right-wing comedy, which typically isn’t about humor at all.It’s about leading a collective ritual of ridicule against an out-group, of being bitterly united in a grievance, of “Let’s Go, Brandon.” Say you’re super-rich and you come to San Francisco after a long absence, but instead of mocking our humongous constellation of Zuckerbergs and crypto-bros and other juicy targets, you tell a meh joke about a homeless guy, which is exactly what Chappelle did.That’s all he’s got, because that’s where he wants to aim it.
The audience laughed anyway, because they’re seated at the throne of Dave Chappelle, the very place that the funniest people in America and the hip-hop gods of the bay all clamor to be.Imagine he had done a total end-run around his critics instead.No disrespect to Jeff Ross, who is brutally hilarious, but what if Chappelle had booked a Black trans comic like Dahlia Belle to open for him? He would have used comedy to defuse this whole thing, no apology required.I watched “The Closer” in its entirety and I was genuinely taken aback.I sat through the full premiere of “Untitled Dave Chappelle Documentary” and it was the loneliest four hours I’ve had in years.I laughed at parts of both, because parts of both are hilarious.I did not cry, even though I wanted to.What I wanted most was to laugh so hard that I shed tears — the good kind, the best kind.
Peter-Astrid Kane (they/them) is the communications manager for San Francisco Pride and a former editor of SF Weekly.If you are in distress, call the National Suicide Prevention hotline 24 hours a day at 800-273-8255, or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org for more resources..
