Bad Chappelle Bits

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The guy who wrote Sumer is Icumin
In croaked—anything good since then?

If Chappelle uses his huge public megaphone to say things "just to be an asshole", then that makes him kind of an asshole. But if, after saying those asshole things and people who are fans of his vociferously tell him that it's not OK to be that kind of asshole, but he doesn't make a genuine public retraction or apology for saying that stuff, then that makes him... a huge, irredeemable asshole.

I think Anthony Jeselnik talks about this sort of thing sometimes, that the art of stand up comedy is in *getting away with it* - if you're gonna do that kind of humor, you have to figure out how to do it in a way that leaves the audience going home happy. you're not supposed to piss them off, you're supposed to make them laugh. so if you do a Netflix special and there's a huge backlash it doesn't mean you're too edgy or that people are too sensitive, it just means you're a bad comedian. I'm pretty sure Norm has said the same thing. like even during the Chappelle Show days when he was actually a really good stand up there were plenty of bits that don't really hold up but the difference is the old Dave realized that those bits just didn't work

I love watching a special where you can see the audience is like 90% Black people and ILX spends an entire day saying they’re only there to be stupid and do hate crimes

― The SoyBoy West Coast (Whiney G. Weingarten)

didn't chappelle literally make this argument in this special? like, he's not transphobic, it's actually _us_ who are who are _racist_? because, like, some gay dude called the cops on chappelle once, which proves that queer people are racist and not, say, that this particular white dude was a racist prick.

i don't know, maybe it's just chappelle's delivery that makes his transphobic material suck

didn't chappelle literally make this argument in this special?

"the last special", sorry

anyway, please, go on with your captain save-a-chaser routine, it's _endlessly_ fascinating and compelling

lol Whiney you're so stupid

I was gonna post something else but I think that sump

*sums it up

i didn't watch the special because i don't hate myself that much but i did read the article

“To be honest with you, I’ve been trying to repair my relationship with the transgender community cause I don’t want them to think that I don’t like them,” he said. “You know how I’ve been repairing it? I wrote a play. I did. Cause I know that gays love plays. It’s a very sad play, but it’s moving. It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n***a. It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play she dies of loneliness cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. It’s sad.”

god dammit chappelle you spoiled the punchline to "the auntie diaries". also "the auntie diaries" was not a joke, so i guess by "spoiled" i mean "tried to copy, but completely got everything about the song wrong and backwards".

All right, I yield to the floor

speaking as a trans woman, the correct nomenclature is "bottoms"

that's not a funny joke but it's still funnier than anything chappelle has ever had to say about us

This was a good take, I thought:

Evoking Norm MacDonald’s name during the set up is so weird considering this was his stance

Chappelle is so washed man https://t.co/WOer1byMUV pic.twitter.com/XT3xxAxdqp

— patdollars (@batdollars) January 3, 2024

And another good/best take from when this all was bubbling up three years ago:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/dave-chappelle-netflix-special-controversy-trans-lgbtq-1235028904/

is there a good stand up comedian who persistently challenges the idea that seems to have sprung up that the form and the vocation is vital and important and the truth society must view in itself

Do you mean doing material that explicitly ridicules this notion? Haven't come across that. But I'd say a lot of comedians - most? - ignore it entirely when actually working on their material, or only delve into it very sporadically...but of course those are the bits that then go viral (James Acaster's bit attacking Ricky Gervais for his treatment of trans people, for instance, bears no resemblance to the vast majority of his act in tone or content).

It bears emphasis that his show (his comedy peak) had a team of writers. If pretty much everything post comeback has seen him mostly stuck in angry and mean mode, well, maybe he at least needs the forced focus of skits or other impositions to keep his self righteous and/or noxious indulgences in check. Like, he *can* be funny and perceptive, still, so why so often just lean into being a LCD dick? To what benefit?

Frogs otm up thread about the Anthony Jeselnik thought.

Norm definitely used transgenderism for jokes (see his norm MacDonald live with Stephen Merchant episode), but unlike the linked Chapelle bit above, there was no political or moral statement overtly attached to his joke. There was always a shield of credible deniability because whenever transgenderism was a subject, it in the service of a “joke”, rather than being the object of a joke. Unlike Chapelle/Ricky/etc where its just a monologue/rant with an intended humorous tinge which never ends up actually being humorous because its primarily a vitriolic rant.

ACAB

I hated comedy when it was just passively transphobic

From the legions of mouthbreathing chuds commenting under anything to do with Chappelle or Gervaise, plus whiney, I have gleaned the following apparently contradictory things: 1) these are just jokes that don’t matter and if you don’t like it don’t watch it end of; 2) this is important truthtelling art that challenges the orthodoxies of the day & it is vital that these geniuses’ ability to say things that upset people is defended

Dave & Ricky have internalised both of these, with prob an unfortunate emphasis on the latter, & it has — inevitably imo! — made their standup progressively worse on a basic technical craft level (obv gervaise was never a good standup on a technical level so the fall is less precipitous but he is still significantly worse even than he was at the beginning)

I didn't realise he was doing the exact same caitlin jenner bit as south park - they know no one wants to defend her so I guess it's part of the joke to try to force people into that position?

xp I would never posit him as some sort of moral authority but I remember some Dara O’Briain interview where he talked about some audience member who confronted him, being all like, why don’t you make jokes about Islam? Why is it only the Catholics?

O’Briain was like, well firstly I am from a Catholic background it’s what I know best and secondly…my role is not to craft attack lines for bigots.

Actually I paraphrase that last part but clip is here from 1.46 on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPLfv9umERU

is there a good stand up comedian who persistently challenges the idea that seems to have sprung up that the form and the vocation is vital and important and the truth society must view in itself

I think John Early and probably others kinda do that through irony.

its disappointing that in all of standup comedy over the past however long this limited and lesser known example is all that we can come up with

but .......

better early than never

Here are more bad Chapelle bits:

1) His clothes suck shit
2) He has never looked cool smoking a cigarette

xp lol well he was just the first person who came to mind bc his recent stand up special was the only one I watched in the past year.

From the legions of mouthbreathing chuds commenting under anything to do with Chappelle or Gervaise, plus whiney, I have gleaned the following apparently contradictory things: 1) these are just jokes that don’t matter and if you don’t like it don’t watch it end of; 2) this is important truthtelling art that challenges the orthodoxies of the day & it is vital that these geniuses’ ability to say things that upset people is defended

I must have missed where Whiney said this

I’m not sure most audiences are hoping for a meta discussion of comedy during a stand up set.

xp I hold up my hands I’ve gleaned nothing from whiney I’m just unfairly lumping him in with the ppl whose side he’s on

Tim Heidecker's stand-up character (not to be confused with his On Cinema character) is a satirical version of the aggrieved white male comedian.

I’m not sure most audiences are hoping for a meta discussion of comedy during a stand up set.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Wednesday, 3 January 2024 14:26 (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is why stewart lee >>>>>>>

Tim Heidecker's stand-up character (not to be confused with his On Cinema character) is a satirical version of the aggrieved white male comedian.

― Chris L, Wednesday, January 3, 2024 9:34 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

But to clarify it's not exactly a parody of the sharp, philosophical type of comedian because the character is a total idiot. Segura likened Tim's stand up character to the shitty stand up comedian archetype that "un-ironically has caution tape over their mouth on their CD album cover".

Tim's (separate) parodies of both Bill Maher's and Joe Rogan's podcasts might be a better comparison, actually!

it wasnt until I saw actual Bill Maher clips floating around (where he gets demolished on vaccines by Seth MacFarlane, of all people) that I realized how spot on that parody actually is, like I cannot believe they actually use some of those camera angles

this is important truthtelling art that challenges the orthodoxies of the day & it is vital that these geniuses’ ability to say things that upset people is defended

And again this points us back to the Acaster routine. The assertion is made that comedians are supposed to ask questions and challenge people. Okay.

So the people you choose to challenge are... trans people. As if they were in danger of getting too confident and comfortable. One might even say... uppity.

Punch up, don't punch down, it's really not complicated.

"Here are more bad Chapelle bits:

1) His clothes suck shit
2) He has never looked cool smoking a cigarette"

all the netflix special clothes look so bad and uncomfortable and itchy.
he definitely doesn't make me want to have a cigarette when i see him and i ALWAYS want to have a cigarette. he looks like lung disease waiting to happen.
he should definitely go on bill maher's podcast show though and then people can watch bill maher not light a joint for an hour and dave not light a cigarette for an hour. its maddening the way they both do that thing. like the guy who keeps talking instead of passing the bowl to the next person.

Who better to ask questions and challenge than some neurotic fuck up of a comedian.

the bitter unfunny autofiction style is really reminding me of late lenny bruce stuff. dave doesn't have a good court case to rant about though.

This thing of the comedian as the brave truth teller, it always comes back to the idea of the court jester, right? As this figure who was allowed to tell truths because it's Just Banter within a totalitarian system where more serious complainants would get their heads cut off. Anyway, I don't know the first thing about this, but have been recently suspecting that that is probably a popcult construct and that, to the extent that real court jesters existed, they were there to make fun of the ruler's enemies and no one would have the slightest problem with them getting their heads cut off if they caused offense - am I offbase?

I do remember Stewart Lee dug up some more ethnographically rigorous examples of a similar kind of thing in his autobio.

idk I think it's pretty simple, comedians are supposed to make people laugh, if they're doing the 'hard questions' routine it's because there's something funny in there, like Louis CK was famously very good at this, maybe he still is but the reality of actually being a sexpest I think changes the context to the point where it's harder for him to actually be funny doing it

I don't agree with the notion that you just can't do jokes about trans people, I think you can but you have to be a skilled comedian to pull it off. it's not really off limits to punch down but its hard because you have to do it in a way that doesn't piss off the group you're making fun of; generally you do this by actually being funny.

And another good/best take from when this all was bubbling up three years ago:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/dave-chappelle-netflix-special-controversy-trans-lgbtq-1235028904/

― he’s an adventurer (derogatory) (flamboyant goon tie included)

yeah i'd definitely say jaclyn moore's take is best take

Norm definitely used transgenderism for jokes (see his norm MacDonald live with Stephen Merchant episode), but unlike the linked Chapelle bit above, there was no political or moral statement overtly attached to his joke. There was always a shield of credible deniability because whenever transgenderism was a subject, it in the service of a “joke”, rather than being the object of a joke. Unlike Chapelle/Ricky/etc where its just a monologue/rant with an intended humorous tinge which never ends up actually being humorous because its primarily a vitriolic rant.

― H.P

i would like to point out that norm mcdonald is literally dead. i mean yeah, he told transphobic jokes. a lot of people told transphobic jokes. you know who told a lot of transphobic jokes? jon stewart. the daily show, wow, they had a _shit-ton_ of transphobic jokes out there. and jon, you know, he's a professional colleague of chappelle, he's someone who clearly has a good deal of respect for chappelle, and when all of this came out he did defend chappelle. i mean he _changed his mind_, though. the best i can tell, he got to a point where he realized "oh wait all of this transphobia stuff i did was kind of bullshit and bigoted and wrong". like most people have figured out that dunking on trans people is pretty openly bigoted and hateful, by this point. either they don't do it, or else they embrace being openly bigoted and hateful. chappelle's done the latter. using a corpse to support your beliefs, whatever those beliefs are, is poor praxis (i should know, i've done that in the past and it was a bad idea).

I didn't realise he was doing the exact same caitlin jenner bit as south park - they know no one wants to defend her so I guess it's part of the joke to try to force people into that position?

― Left

see for me there's a clear distinction. caitlyn jenner is a terrible human being on many, many levels. she's also very definitely a woman. her awfulness and her womanhood are in no way correlated. basically all the other trans people i know hate caitlyn jenner, but none of us think of her as anything but a woman.

is there a good stand up comedian who persistently challenges the idea that seems to have sprung up that the form and the vocation is vital and important and the truth society must view in itself

well i mean look at the kinds of people who become stand-up comedians. "stand-up comedian" is one of the top professions for severely traumatized people who hate themselves. i mean that was ricky gervais' whole schtick, right? the cringe comedy thing? louis c.k.? you do the thing where you get on stage and say "i'm an awful, loathsome person", and you're really successful at that until people realize that this is an ideal pretext for saying and doing awful, loathsome things, and their whole career is now about exploiting other people's sympathy for them and the continued awful, loathsome things they say. "sympathy for ricky gervais" isn't exactly a patch on "sympathy for the devil". hannah arendt to thread.

if someone is doing a job as punishing and shitty as stand-up comedian, one has to be doing it for a reason, right? and for a lot of comedians that reason is this notion that the work they're doing is _important_ and _provocative_, you know, it's an attempt to compensate for one's own pitifully low sense of self-worth. i mean i'm not saying anything particularly insightful or novel here. pretty much the entire history of stand-up comedy bears this out.

anyway that's why queer standup is more interesting to me, it's some weird fucked-up form of therapy, it's people who have been taught to hate themselves learning to not hate themselves. is it funny? not always. is it "the truth society must view in itself"? not really. is it loathsome the way ricky gervais is? not at all.

Doug Stanhope has a bit on nationalism and immigrants that gets passed around - it's beyond offensive in a lot of ways (his physical portrayal of immigrants) but they aren't the actual target (white people whining about immigrants) so it feels different from the caution-tape-reading-cancelled comics now. It's actually effective comedy in that mold of making you uncomfortable.

OTOH I watched ten minutes of Fern Brady talking about her Scottish accent and short boyfriend and I'd really rather have more of that than any truth telling in 2023.

Bob Newhart's one sided phone conversations were the only good comedy

"stand-up comedian" is one of the top professions for severely traumatized people who hate themselves.

Nailed it.

and that's okay

xxpost my dad loved those, I grew to appreciate those with him.

"ever landed a big plane like this before? it's easy, you just disengage the automatic pilot. it's the lever all the way to the right...err, not all the way to the right. you already pulled it? Oh...well...I don't know how to tell you this, you just emptied the washroom. Hold on, I'm getting an emergency call. Yeah Pan Am, what is it? Yeah, that was 209 from Miami, he's a new boy. it won't happen again, I guarantee it."

Comedians love one sided conversations

lol

yall gotta let call me by your name go, me and the devil broke up 3 years ago. yall acting like children of divorce https://t.co/HVOfhTVaky

— ✟ (@LilNasX) January 3, 2024