Dave Chappelle has released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, which is full of jokes about the trans community and disabled people.
“I love punching down!” he tells the audience, in a one-hour show that landed on the streaming service today (31 December).
It’s his seventh special for Netflix and comes two years after his last one, the highly controversial release The Closer.
That programme was criticised for its relentless jokes about the trans community, and Chappelle revisits the topic in his new show.
He tells jokes about trans women in prison, and about trans people “pretending” to be somebody they are not.
He’s not putting on a minstrel show, he’s just voicing out his biases. The Chapelle Show had a subversive and punk edge to it because it made of fun of regressive attitudes about race, what’s happening right now just kind of proves that Chapelle himself was never subversive.
I agree with this assessment, but I also have to wonder, based on the percentage of white people who have shown me the “black kkk member” bit, and found it maybe a little too funny, what percentage of his audience was actually in on the joke. It doesn’t really matter whether or not he’s actually putting on a minstrel show, what matters is whether or not people perceive it as one. Partially, impossible to insure against, but still, something to be conscious of.