
Dave Chappelle and the End of Comedy
I recently watched Dave Chappelle’s Sticks and Stones stand-up special on Netflix, and it was goddamn funny. Sadly, others did not share my point of view. Respectable internet outlets decried the special for being transphobic.
This anti-Chappelle sentiment is just part of the boring Media Outrage Machine. There appears to be a whole group of cultural commentators whose sole purpose is to identify the artistic products that we should be upset about. These people are no fun, so I tried to move on with my life!
Then I saw this:

This NYT headline pointing out an obvious joke and the pile-on against Chappelle are symptoms of a broader disease in our culture. Specifically, the far Left (overrepresented in major news outlets) is ruining humor by taking everything too seriously. The result of this is that the Right gets to claim ownership of all the funny people and become the true counterculture. Is that what you want, NYT???
There are three ways that the Left is fucking up comedy, all related to one another:
(1) Demanding that comedy be “true”
(2) Demanding that comedians “punch up” instead of “punch down”
(3) Demanding that comedy serve a higher (political) purpose
I am not a grand theorist of humor a la Kant, but I don’t think these are desirable goals for any comedian. In fact, I’d venture to say that these are all stupid things which no one should ever care about. How did these become the norm? The answer is that Hard Cultural Left wants to use comedy as propaganda. Unfortunately this never works and is doomed to fail.
(1) Demanding that comedy be true
This shows up every once in a while. Pundits will sometimes use this critique to make people look bad. NYT claims that Trump “faked” a photo of himself giving a hero dog a medal. So therefore Trump is a liar. Therefore bad.
I guess this is technically true. It is not the case that Trump awarded a medal to this dog. The picture Trump tweeted is obviously photoshopped and is not presented as fact. All this tells me is that Trump is a better memer than the NYT.
Fact-checking a joke makes you look like an out-of-touch assclown. It is also virtually guaranteed to fail as a smear. All Trump needs to do in this case is say “Lol remember that dog thing? I was joking. NYT is an out-of-touch assclown, don’t believe what they say about impeachment.” Now he wins that exchange. Nice work NYT!
(2) Demanding that comedians “punch up” instead of “punch down”
Punching down is when you make fun of someone who’s more oppressed than you. Maybe this is a rule they teach in clown school I don’t know. It is definitely a newish rule because George Carlin used the n-word. The punching down problem also fits nicely into the intersectionality framework:
A left-handed transgender woman can make fun of a right-handed transgender woman but NOT the other way around. Anyone can make fun of poor white people. Asians can make fun of white people but no one else. This is all extremely well-documented and if you’re confused about it you obviously didn’t go to college. If you didn’t go to college you should just keep your mouth shut. Check your privilege you uneducated oppressor.¹
The problem with this is that intersectionality breaks down sometimes. I’m not sure who’s more oppressed, Dave Chappelle or Caitlin Jenner. Both of them seem to be doing really well. My understanding of oppression was that transitory white males are better off than permanent black males but again, I don’t have a PhD.
There are other, bigger problems with the punching up/down framework. It is hopelessly blind to its own excesses. If you can get someone fired for punching down, doesn’t that mean you had all the power in the first place? Check your privilege.
The biggest problem of all, of course, is that some people are just fun to make fun of. This is independent of their status. It is undoubtedly fun to dunk on the POTUS when you get the chance. That is great humor and I applaud it. It is also fun to poke fun at normal stupid people. This is just how the world works.
(3) Demanding that comedy serve a higher (political) purpose
Demanding that comedy serve your political agenda is the big boogeyman behind all this. It is the problem from which all other problems stem. Using comedy as political messaging is annoying.
When the mask starts to slip and we realize that we are living in some weird post-comedy matrix where our cultural overlords feed us only Critical Gender/Race/Other Studies-approved content, it becomes annoying AND disturbing.

Why is comedy being transmuted into political messaging? Well, the short answer seems to be that people with serious political projects are humorless and must suppress all the real jokers. Just ask the Communists.
Why do our left-leaning elites want it to be used once more for this purpose? I believe it is because they know that people are not fully buying their message.
Look at poor Dave. He isn’t going to the Gulag, but those mean reviewers are smearing him with charges of transphobia. The reality is that Dave has some potent cultural commentary in Sticks and Stones that these people would rather not grapple with: (1) the trans movement is an awkward fit in the LGBT movement, (2) normal people in “oppressed groups” don’t usually mind being made fun of, and (3) the Left is hypocritical in the way it deploys outrage and language-policing.² How’s that for truth?
These are not withering critiques of the trans movement, but they are definitely countercultural truth-bombs. The hard Left doesn’t want comedians to make fun of protected classes because sometimes the protected classes are spouting nonsense. They also think language causes oppression. Or maybe language IS oppression. I don’t know, but either way it’s dumb.
When you start to take yourself too seriously, it makes you unfunny. “Trump is bad” is not funny. Disowning Chappelle also drives him into the arms of those you hate. Dave is not an alt-right 4chan hero, but now he is a beacon for those who feel (rightly) that they can’t speak their mind. Nice work!
When you start to take yourself too seriously, it opens you up to satire that you can’t suppress. The uptight and insecure Left is making the countercultural Right look funny and sexy. Okay not sexy. But definitely funny. The Right also has a total monopoly on memes, the only place where media innovation is happening. Memes are the beating heart of post-woke youth movements. Serious question, has there ever been a funny left-leaning meme?
All of this is a sign that the locus of cultural power in these debates is not the illuminati of white-cis-het males. The power is with the (still mostly white) overeducated hard Left space cadets in the media. Dave Chappelle can’t be the only one tired of this. The media is now primed to receive a countercultural backlash that they can’t control. Now that’s funny!
[1]: Citation needed
[2]: If you need further evidence of this, try to find a commentator in the world who is outraged about the Chappelle bit where he fantacizes about killing heroin addicted whites in his kitchen. If that’s not violence-inducing (it’s not, it’s funny AF) then obviously jokes don’t induce violence.
