This is the most tip-toe hem-haw super-safe take on Chappelle's specials that I think I've read yet. Both of Chapelle's specials were confrontational in every way that this article strived to excuse those specials.

Get a spine, dude.

Also, "Whatever the case, it appears that after more than a decade, Dave Chappelle still has sufficient cultural capital to brush off these types of concerns." That's not cultural capital. That's capital capital. He just got $30m for two specials where he told boring-ass jokes about how Trans people have more rights than black people, and trying to turn his abandoning a Flint charity event for the Oscars during a rather racial Boycott into an "I'm only human" moment. The specials were attempts to portray himself as a flawed human but they ended up normalizing his foibles.

I'm done with him.

Oh, and if you found the special funny. That's fine. But, you better motherfucking own that shit. None of this nimby-pimbly "he's an old rich man so it's kinda ok because he doesn't know any better" excuse making bullshit. If I see something I like that is extremely problematic, and these specials were extremely problematic, I call them out on their bullshit and say that it's not OK.

"Refusal to wear a leather outfit"? WTF? Is he on record saying "I refuse to wear a leather outfit"? What's this got to do with anything?

Dr. Abe, notice that your current defender is a troll account who probably imagines themself to be a hilarious insult comic when the majority of what they do is call people cunts and pricks like a 10-year-old. That should tell you something about your writing here.

I watched it (and FWIW, I'm a white CIS heterosexual liberal) and I laughed out loud. I disagree with this review, but does that matter? What's funny to one person is not funny to another, always, and for any, infinite number of reasons. Did I find some of the material not funny and uncomfortable, yes. So what? Why do we expect Dave Chappelle or anyone like him to speak for all black people and to perform in a way that is acceptable to you (the universal you).

Any number of white comedians, male and female, do not speak for me, do not represent my personal experience, and are downright offensive (to ME). Again, so what? Chappelle and his colleagues are comedians FFS, not the president of the United States. Why do we expect so much from our entertainers and hold them to a standard to uphold human decency (as WE, personally, define it) when the GD president of the United States gets a pass for mocking the disabled, viewing women as only f***able body parts, calling black people lazy and living in horrific conditions in inner cities with "nothing to lose," calling Hispanics and immigrants rapists, thieves, and murderers, and basically lying 100% of the time. So you don't like Chappelle, who cares? Fairly certain Chappelle doesn't. He got paid.

And FWIW, I fail to see how discussion of being called a N*****, being stopped by police while driving black, talking about Bill Cosby and how complicated and horrific it is that someone who was a hero to him, who did such incredible things for black American society, is also a rapist who committed literally a staggering amount of rape, how white people have thrown banana peels at him at shows, how white people have thrown snowballs at him from cars, and how white people in his Ohio community who witnessed the incident gathered not to lynch him, but support him, including the police who "put the fates of white children in his hands" is comedy that is from a pre-BlackLivesMatter reality.

BLM's existence is not some kind of moral absolute by which you can judge anything, especially comedy.

" To make things more troublesome, this type of comedy, which completely disregards the premise of in-group/out-group dynamics..."

oH MY gOD,,,we're living in Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron world....

Oh Lawd!

"THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter
than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the
211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution,,,," Vonnegut

@2 " I call them out on their bullshit and say that it's not OK. " ok, yeah, you stand up there!!! Do you actually say that to your TV, standing in your underwear, "It's NOT OK, and I'm not going to take it anymore!!!"

....that one seems familiar too :)

People that get offended because someone didn't say what they wanted him to say. Or made a joke that challenges what you think is normal. Like this schmuck with these long replies lambasting Chapelle because he doesn't blindly accept your take on transgenderism.

Boy, you got Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele's names ALL fucked up.

Chappelle is "heavier" - he's been body building. He's absolutely jacked.

Chapelle is a genius just as Richard Pryor and George Carlin were.