Why So Serious? (The What Remix)
Casual,
Happy New Year!
We spinning! We spinning around the Sun!
Anyway, I hope you celebrated with gusto. It was another fabulous year in Jersey City (JC). I can’t tell you what we did, but I remember being in bed by ten. I think I spent most of the day waiting to get back in bed. YOLO!!!
Maybe next year J and I will break loose and party. It is such an effort and an expense. And I am also a little bit uncomfortable doing anything too far from the kids. The distance between us and them whenever we go out isn’t too far, but the number of obstacles — conditions and flow of traffic — that can prevent us from getting back to them quickly is unbearable.
I held for a moment your suggestion of writing about things, our concerns about the “real” world, in my mind, and I was scared. The things we usually chat about the most, offline and off the record, I consider almost intimate, and one of my rare moments of joy. Moments that are on the decline. I feel like our conversations out of the public eye are where we can be our silliest; it’s hard to write online about our joys and elation about things when it is entirely possible that some people will not be able to resist engaging with us with their troll-ishiest fiendishness. Not to mention grammar nazis! Oh my! But this is the environment, and I guess we have to endure and work together in order to persevere through the bullshit.
Which is, I guess, a good transition into a conversation about Dave Chappelle. Like many, I eagerly awaited his return to an affordable medium. I cannot afford to go see him on stage in the environment in which he feels the most comfortable. (A discussion for another time could be why he and Cornel West have decided to avoid their industries. He is another controversial figure who has made a choice to step away from the usual outlets made for his profession. We can discuss what that means later too.)
My first several drafts were about my process of coming to terms with the specials, trying to relate the steps I took in order to review the content of the show. And they were about my fear. It is important for me to check my thought process and how I evaluate and examine my heuristics and codes I might use to measure and judge, or decode, any performance. That’s what I attempted. Culture is such as hotly contested term, and anyone’s influence and claim of influence on it must be thoroughly examined as much as the methods used to examine such claims. Dave Chappelle’s approach to controversy creates controversy that has an influence on our culture (technically, capital D Discourses). I wanted to attempt be clear about what and how I examine these discourses. I don’t think my earlier drafts did the job.
I can see how my particular style, my meanderings, might appear to yield some false equivalencies or hasty generalizations if I had simply generalized and confidently passed judgment. I believe the word you used was equivocation, which is a logical fallacy that would have to be associated with trying to make a point using ambiguity to remain uncommitted to it or to be disingenuous. I might have mentioned explicitly that I have not come to any sort of conclusions; my argument is mostly about how I figure out what my arguments are and put them together. This is why I mentioned Stuart Hall and not just to namedrop for cultural studies cred. And I think there is something unjust in not being clear about the tools we use to analyze and evaluate. That might just be the conventions I am used to at the moment (or I may have a point worth exploring). But it did strike me, after hearing your comments, that in this day and age, when a linguist makes a serious case for tribalism as the word of 2017, it would be apropos to be clear about where I hang my hat.
Not to sound nihilistic, which is totally a nothing genre of thinking (see what I did there?), but I hang my hat in the I have resigned from this posturing circus arena. Here’s why: comedy is an art specifically meant to provoke thought. Comedians make arguments too, if they are good and have a particular agenda (just listen to this white guy and this Brit and Reggie Watts). Their tools are rooted in language and whatever cultural traditions make up their particular idiolect and brand of comedy. The combination should, if done right, re-organize the context of a stand-up show to place things together that are incongruous and potentially laughable.
For example, Dave Chappelle has two methods for manipulating context: his persona and the situations he gets in and tells us about because he’s Dave Chappelle. It is obvious they are interrelated, which is a no brainer; everyone gets it. Great. We’re good. A great example of this is his bit with the Amish. Dave Chappelle is not persona Dave Chappelle. His persona is a parody of his awareness of how he is perceived as a celebrity and as a black man. He’s fucking Bart from Blazing Saddles, and he’s Bugs Bunny, who Dave Chappelle has mentioned influenced his comedic performance (his other inspirations are Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, and Richard Pryor). Again, this is nothing new, but it should never be forgotten whenever you hear anything coming out of his mouth. Ignoring the means used to make comedy and its purpose is profoundly boorish.
Besides his persona, I thought a lot about his topics and his tastes in subjects. It seems pretty obvious he touches on current events, hip hop, race, celebrity, class, masculinity, and history. His comedy riffs off of his inspirations as an homage or pastiche of their works, but it is also rich in African American traditions like signifyin’. Another of which is hip hop. We’re within his generation, so when I hear him, I often think of Yo Mama jokes. I looked at a review of this book, which I now must read, “Yo Mama Ain’t Got No Drawers: Singing the Dozens.” What struck me was this sentence, “[The Dozens] is at once an insult and an exhibit of deep affection and respect. While there is seemingly no more offensive gesture than to insult one’s mother, one would never allow such an insult unless there was already a shared respect for one’s opponent” [Powell, 2013].
Perhaps there will be some bemoaning this, but I think there is a deep respect and understanding in the gesture of simply including transgender people into his cash of jokes, but there is a great deal of social distance between the actual Dave Chappelle, the guy who makes money by telling dirty jokes about people who don’t know him like that, that other Dave Chappelle I mentioned earlier, and the transgender community. I think that social distance makes him come off as an asshole, which I think is part of his performance. But it also just makes him look like an asshole.
He makes this a part of the conversation in Equanimity. The conversation about how much trouble he is in with the LGBTQ community leads him into his premise: “Does Dave Chappelle has an issue with Transgender people?” It is easy to postulate that his joke has been labeled transphobic; he alludes to his previous jokes from The Age of Spin as he continues to create the context and add to his initial premise. Besides his tag about Caitlyn Jenner, which wasn’t the punchline, the transphobic joke is one about dancing with a transgender person at a club in Los Angeles. The story resolves with the two spending the night together and having breakfast in the morning. The parts that are transphobic are, I am guessing, the mention of the knuckles and the sultry voice, which leads into another round of banter which results in their sexual encounter. I can’t imagine that we are still puritanical enough to think that fucking is taboo or outside the convention of comedy. Or maybe these jokes are just played.
The thing that gets me is the rejoinder at the end in response to the audience’s shock and laughter: “I just titty fucked them.” Veed reminded me that the whole idea is that everyone gets to pick their pronoun, which begs the question, Why did Dave Chappelle choose “them” over “her”? Is this a slight or recognition? Or something else? I’m going to lean towards recognition because of his earlier bit from The Age of Spin, where the ego-centric persona wonders why he has to change up his pronoun game. He seems to be riffing off of that joke considering he is talking about having sex with a person within the community he had insulted earlier with his insensitivity. But it also seems that with them, he is showing some awareness. Or not. But am I the only one who sees that? I didn’t find it funny, though. It did seem a bit lazy, or it bored me. Fuck. I can’t remember now.
The other side of this could also fit: he didn’t recognize the transgender woman as a woman, despite the additional rejoinder, “Those titties are as real as any in LA.” He’s making their womanness about genitals. The conclusion I draw is that he is contesting gender (the system) in his way, and he does see the transgender woman as a woman and treats them with the usual parody of misogyny prevalent in his act. The joke is inclusive, ironically?
Or I am wrong. There is the possibility that his execution and social distance from the community of his subject and his language invoke dominant discourses of superiority. I’m sure it is certain to some. I understand that sometimes jokes belittle and imply some form of superiority. Taking each of Dave Chappelle’s compositions as a whole, from the opening credits to the end credits, I have to say that the show is far more complicated than superiority or chauvinism perceived in his punchlines.
Dave Chappelle’s stage persona reveals that he’s a bit of a sucka, and he “fails” because of his own appetites like any good trickster, despite his attempts at braggadocio. The joke is supposed to be on him. I understand the jeopardy and danger of the situation that transgender people are in right now because Agent Orange has emboldened a population of idiots who cannot read Dave Chappelle the way I read him (my codes are oppositional and negotiated based on Hall; I’m not down for any kind of orthodoxy or chauvinism; I also prefer the benign violation theory). I understand that joking about a group from the outside can seem mean or divisive. Dave Chappelle might have provided ammunition to a bunch of fools because they just see what’s at the surface. Ironic?
When thinking about writing this letter and evaluating Dave Chappelle’s specials, my mind leaned heavily on several texts: The Idea of Comedy, “Encoding, Decoding” by Stuart Hall, “The Humor Code” which is about The Humor Code and research from the Humor Research Lab, “Yo Mama Ain’t Got No Drawers: Singing the Dozens,” “A Compiled List of Collective Nouns,” and the Philosophy of Humor entry from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The list does go on. When I turn to academics, it’s usually because the common sense view turns banal and orthodox; more likely, my thoughts are treated like the middle child of discussion. Huh? Did you speak? With the academics, I can at least explore and investigate more than one perspective besides the preconceived suppositions and positions that one is supposed to hold if one is for this or for that. The tools are there to use and break apart.
In any case, “A Compiled List of Collective Nouns” is actually a good example of how comedy uses ambiguity to create incongruous meanings. In many respects, equivocation is the rhetorical tool necessary to shift what you expect to the unexpected and keep things ambiguous. My favorites are the first two:
A group of ants is called a colony.
A group of aunts is called a book club.
They’re homophones, right? No. They’re not. Fuck everyone who says ant for aunt!
Now, do I really mean that? Fuck everyone is clearly violent if considered literally (if I meant figuratively, maybe?), but it also “has to do with lots of loving and it ain’t nothing nice.” There’s a social distance I’m suggesting in assuming familiarity to curse at you (and everyone else). I could quip an entirely more gruesome quip, but the selection of language I chose fits an established pattern of conversation (kidding) that is probably familiar to a lot of people. I would like to think, because of the earlier work I did, that my intent and the use of fuck should indicate a more benign meaning. If people recognize I’m kidding, there’s a lot I don’t need to say. I know there are plenty of reasons why people say aunt like ant and why it doesn’t matter (technically, they are homophones). I don’t really mind, but it is funny to me. Am I superior?
Inherent in the joke is an inquiry which can lead to the construction of an argument: why are these two words treated as homophones when orthographically, they shouldn’t be? The juxtaposition is unexpected, among other things, and therefore funny if you get it (ant and aunt do not sound at all alike in some speech communities). There is also this thing about the social distance: you and me are considerably close, so you know I sometimes employ vitriol ironically, signifyin’ nothing. (See what I did there?) But someone else might be put off. I don’t think Dave Chappelle is doing anything different than this. These jokes are inclusive because some folks are ribbed safely; the topic (ant/aunt) is, I hope, unimportant. Dave Chappelle dives into controversy with a similar agenda and cultural analysis; His intention is to make us laugh while thinking about these subjects from a different angle. Or no?
By the by, looking at how I look at Dave Chappelle is not giving him a pass. SMH.
Anyway, blah fuckin’ blah. I do get why people are serious and take issue with him. I’m personally more inclined to consider that his specials were kind of lazy. Perhaps there was an element of spitting off the dome, which gave the appearance of laziness or something. It’s late. I can’t think about it anymore.
School has started again. I’m in the work doldrums; the whisper network is working its magic on my reputation and my wallet. I am so broke and so doomed. In other news, I got rated on Rate My Professor! I’m seriously honored. And sad. Regardless, it’s good to be talked about (see what I did there?)
Cheers,
Delmatic
