[Dave Chappelle’s trans friend knew how to take a joke. So
what?] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT DAVE CHAPPELLE GETS WRONG ABOUT TRANS PEOPLE AND COMEDY  
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Aja Romano
October 23, 2021
Vox
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_ Dave Chappelle’s trans friend knew how to take a joke. So what? _


Neverending Nina speaks as trans employees and allies at Netflix walk
out in protest of the Dave Chappelle special on October 20, 2021, in
Los Angeles, California., Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images

 

Toward the end of Dave Chappelle’s incendiary Netflix standup
special _The Closer_, he says something revealing about the fight
he’s waged against trans people — a fight that’s drawn Netflix
itself into the fray
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which led to a walkout and protest against the company on October 20.

After discussing the death of his friend, a trans comedian named
Daphne Dorman who Chappelle also mentioned in his previous
special _Sticks and Stones_
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Chappelle makes a joke where the punchline is to blatantly misgender
her. Then he says, “As hard as it is to hear a joke like that, I’m
telling you right now — Daphne would have loved that joke.”

As I’ve attempted to grapple with the aims of Chappelle’s comedy,
this line has stuck with me. Chappelle’s use of Dorman as a kind of
totem for the type of relationship he’d like to have with the trans
community at large is both telling and confusing — not because of
what it says about Chappelle and Dorman, but because of what it says
about the nature of comedy and the nature of pain.

Trans people have expressed outrage
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both Chappelle and Netflix for amplifying overtly transphobic and
anti-scientific views about gender and trans identity. In his defense
of Chappelle, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos first said
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he didn’t believe _The Closer_ could cause any real-world harm,
and then, after recanting
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statement, said that trans people would simply have to deal with the
special being on the platform. What we wind up with, then, is this:
Yes, _The Closer_ could cause real-world harm, but trans people will
just have to get over it.

So perhaps the real question is, should trans people have to get over
it? “Yes” seems to be the answer from _The Closer_, more or less.
There’s no getting around the reality that transphobic rhetoric like
Chappelle’s absolutely contributes to real-life harm. But Chappelle
seems to view that hurt, and even the immediate pain of his
transphobic jokes, as a worthy trade-off.

Chappelle wants to make classes of oppression into a zero-sum game.
Individual identity doesn’t work that way.

Throughout _The Closer_, Chappelle argues — often savvily, if with
glaring hypocrisy — that many queer and trans people enjoy white
privilege, and that their white privilege makes them essentially more
cosseted and protected than Chappelle and other Black men in America.
“Gay people are minorities until they need to be white again,” he
notes at one point. Chappelle gets close to lobbing a critique of
social justice movements that mainly focus on aiding white people, but
his analysis lacks nuance: He frames whiteness as the protective cover
most gay and transgender people default to, ignoring Black trans
people in the course of the show.

Chappelle repeatedly attempts to redirect the conversation back to
concerns of Black oppression and violence against Black communities.
These are serious problems — but in contrast, he treats the equality
movement among sexual and gender minorities as essentially shrill
window-dressing. Chappelle rarely acknowledges that these communities
contain people of color; instead, he frames the concerns of queer and
genderqueer people — especially the linguistic arguments about
pronouns, anatomy, and bodily functions that often arise from
conversations about trans and nonbinary identity — as solely a
product of white progressive hysteria gone mad.

In fact, in the moment where he comes closest to accepting trans
identity, again using his friend Daphne as his lodestar, it’s the
semantic argument that makes the crucial difference for Chappelle.
Praising Dorman for her skills as a comedian and her good-natured
attitude, he recalls Dorman telling him, “I don’t need you to
understand me. I just need you to believe that I’m having a human
experience.” Then he points out that he accepted her explicitly
“because she didn’t say anything about pronouns” or make him
feel like he was about to be “in trouble” for saying something
wrong.

On one level, Chappelle’s anxiety here is deeply relatable. It’s
the anxiety felt by many people who are frustrated by cancel culture
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what they perceive as its policing of language and free speech. No one
likes to be yelled at or told they’re problematic, especially if
they say the “wrong” thing when they’re trying to get clarity on
complex situations. Much of the conversation around “canceling”
and the reactionary politics it engenders — reactionary politics
that include all of Chappelle’s recent comedy material — seems to
demand a degree of patience with people who are still working out the
basic issues surrounding complicated identity vectors. Often, thinking
about these things is hard.

But Chappelle makes it clear that he needs Dorman to exist on his
terms, not hers — not as a trans woman with autonomy, but as a trans
woman who’s proven she deserves autonomy by way of having a chill,
laid-back sense of humor. Furthermore, in repeatedly reducing
Dorman’s existence to her body parts and her relationship to them
and the language surrounding them, Chappelle dehumanizes her and
dehumanizes other trans people.

Dorman’s fate — she died by suicide shortly after the release
of _Sticks and Stones_ in 2019 — directly undermines Chappelle’s
logic. Because Dorman was trans, she was at an extremely high risk of
dying by suicide
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violence
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Any way you look at it, trans people are among the most vulnerable
populations in society:

* Out of all hate crimes that result in homicide, 72 percent
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the victims are trans women, according to 2013 data.
* 50 percent
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trans people will experience sexual assault or abuse in their
lifetimes; this number is even higher
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Black trans people.
* 54 percent
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trans people experience intimate partner violence.
* Trans people of color are six times
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likely to experience police brutality than white cisgender people.
* 10 percent
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trans people experience violence from a family member after coming out
as trans. Eight percent of trans people are kicked out of their homes
after coming out.
* 30 percent
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trans people experience homelessness at least once in their lives.
* In 2015, 30 percent
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trans people reported experiencing workplace harassment, including
sexual assault, physical harassment, or being fired for their gender
expression.
* More than 50 percent
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trans teens seriously considered suicide in the last year; more than
66 percent of trans teens experienced major symptoms of depression
within the two weeks prior to the survey.

This is what Chappelle’s critics mean when they discuss the
real-world impact of Chappelle’s transphobia. His comedy, which
involves continually insisting, against science, that gender is always
tied to biology, isn’t just reactionary semantics. It’s dangerous
rhetoric that’s been shown in study
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directly impact the levels of anti-trans violence and societal
prejudice that trans people already face daily.

It’s important not to omit this reality from the equation — which
is what Chappelle does when he treats Dorman as though she’s a
comedian first and a trans woman second.

Chappelle seems to think all trans people should have the attitude of
comedians like Dorman

Chappelle views comedians as their own “tribe.” In _The Closer_,
he even claims Dorman for his own “tribe” and not for the trans
community: “She wasn’t their tribe, she was mine,” he says.
“She was a comedian in her soul.”

Chappelle’s not just talking about comedy as a medium here, he’s
talking about comedy as a worldview. Comedy is a subculture, after
all, with its own very particular set of rules and mores. Perhaps the
chief rule is the one comedians tend to embrace the hardest: Always,
always be able to take a joke.

In the past, this principle has led to the privileging, within the
comedy community, of the comedian’s right to make rude, disturbing,
or even heinously offensive jokes. The logic goes that if the comedian
can take a joke, the audience should be less sensitive, too. (See, for
instance, the notorious moment in 2012 when a comedian heckled a woman
in the audience who reacted to a sketch about rape jokes by making a
rape joke about her
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Much of the recent cultural conversation over comedy and free speech
has centered on the idea that comedians should be able to discomfit
their audiences, whether in the service of making them laugh or making
them think, without backlash — and that if you can’t handle a joke
that makes you uncomfortable, that’s your problem, not the
joke-maker’s.

Dorman herself was adept at taking an offensive joke. As Chappelle
recalls, when an audience member interrupted one of Dorman’s shows
with a transphobic question, she shot back by making an even better
joke about her own anatomy. This, Chappelle wants us all to know,
should be the response when we’re confronted with transphobia: not
anger, hurt, or pain; not a walkout in protest of Netflix, but
good-humored deflection.

This rule applies, at best, within the realm of comedy, between a
comedian and their audience, not to the lived experiences of people in
their everyday lives. Chappelle seems to need all trans people to
accept the mores of his own very specific professional subculture, and
he makes this request sound reasonable — he’s just a guy wanting
to be allowed to make transphobic jokes without getting canceled for
it, geez — but in practice, it’s baffling. Most people aren’t
comedians, and most people are sensitive to jokes designed
specifically to hurt them. Chappelle’s idea that trans people should
have to prove, like Dorman, that they can take a joke without getting
offended before they’re worthy of respect is a bit like a journalist
demanding trans people prove they can use AP style before allowing
them to command a conversation about their own gender identity.

What’s more, if “always be able to take a joke” is sacrosanct,
there’s another rule that comedy holds just as dear: the one about
never “punching down
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In comedy, punching down refers to humor that targets vulnerable
groups of people who don’t hold much power in society. It exists in
opposition to the kind of “punch up” that aims to critique people
and institutions with power. Onstage, punching down is generally
considered a huge “No” — the kind of thing that can immediately
alienate an audience if you’re not doing it to make a deeper point.
(Chappelle talks about this concept in _The Closer_, asking the
larger LGBTQIA community not to “punch down” on his people,
using Kevin Hart
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examples.)

Chappelle’s deeper point seems to return again and again to the idea
that trans people are too sensitive and that this sensitivity is
somehow bolstered by white fragility. He seems to feel that his
prioritization of the pain of Black communities over those of trans
communities — as if, again, they are entirely separate — justifies
an evening devoted to homophobic and transphobic jokes. Because
Chappelle seems to believe that all queer and trans people have white
privilege, he views himself as punching neither up nor down and even
quotes Dorman as suggesting as much.

But Chappelle, of all people, should know better. He’s hyper-aware,
as a comedian who frequently uses humor to make points about racial
and social justice, that comedy impacts the real world. In fact, in
2005, Chappelle completely killed his own hit comedy show, the
legendary _Chappelle’s Show_, because of one joke
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made him realize, according to an interview
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gave to Time, that rather than critiquing racist comedy, he might
instead be reinforcing racist stereotypes for white audiences who were
enjoying the joke unironically.

At the very least, then, Chappelle should know that there’s a
possibility his jokes about trans people could be taken the wrong way
and used to hurt trans people. There’s even an echo of the 2005
moment in the new special, when Chappelle has to stop and gently
reprimand an audience member who starts to applaud a transphobic law.
As Vulture’s Craig Jenkins put it
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“You talk enough shit, and you’ll draw flies.”

Rather than acknowledging this possibility and its potential for harm,
Chappelle not only justifies his comedy using white privilege, but
seems to go a step further: He suggests that being hurt is good for
trans and nonbinary people. When he says, “As hard as it is to hear
a joke like that,” and then follows it up with any kind of defense,
he’s telling audiences that he knows the joke is painful, hurtful,
and transphobic — but that it’s somehow productive for trans
people to be confronted by it. That it’s a learning experience to be
confronted with transphobia onstage, as though trans people aren’t
confronted with gender policing in every other moment of their lives.

Only then, in Chappelle’s telling, can Chappelle and trans people
“[start] getting to the bottom of shit.” Once trans people have
shown him that they’re capable of being good-humored about other
people’s continual objectification and degrading dismissal of
transgender identity issues, they can — on the terms of the person
using transphobia to interact with them — be heard and accepted and
loved.

This isn’t equality. Chappelle, who’s spent his entire comedy
career using humor to make sharp, trenchant commentary on racism and
injustice, should know that. Trans people should never have to just
live with or get over or get used to rhetoric that dehumanizes them.
The man who speaks viscerally
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the fear Black Americans experience daily should know that asking
trans people to accept and embrace transphobic ideology isn’t
tolerance. It certainly isn’t the love and good humor he wants to be
credited with.

And despite the audience laughing with Chappelle, it’s not funny at
all.

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