Dave Chappelle and the Error of Debating “Team TERF”
Comedy matters. We shouldn’t write it off as “just jokes”.
I’m the last person the world needs to hear about Dave Chappelle’s latest controversy. Your time would be better spent with trans writers and black writers and people who are living with these issues. I’ll provide some links soon, but I want to own my privilege and distance from these issues. (I’m a well-to-do cishet white guy living in Wisconsin.) Still, I want to make some points, and I hope they contribute more signal than noise.
For those who don’t know: The comedian Dave Chappelle has in recent years released a series of comedy specials on Netflix which spend a significant amount of time focused on LGBTQ issues. His most recent special The Closer, in which Chappelle proudly claims he is “Team TERF”, was followed by a flurry of controversy. Some claimed that LGBTQ activists are trying to “cancel” the comedian (a notion Chappelle discusses in the special, with regard to JK Rowling.)
A trans Netflix employee named Terra Field posted a thread on Twitter explaining why she and others are angry — not because they are “offended”, but because of “the harm that content like this does to the trans community (especially trans people of color) and VERY specifically Black trans women.” Days later she was suspended; the company insists it was not related to her tweets. Elsewhere, the writer Saeed Jones wrote a piece for GQ detailing the “betrayal” he has experienced as a fan of Chappelle. You should also read this article about Portland trans comedian Dahlia Belle. (“I’m not even angry,” she says. “He’s just wrong.”) Watch trans writer Hope Giselle discuss the issue with Touré and Marc Lamont Hill.
When I objected on Twitter to Chappelle’s nonsense, my friend Robin asked if I had watched The Closer. I said I had not, and he challenged me to give it a shot. So I did — provided he watch the 2020 documentary about Maria Ressa — and now I feel certified to discuss it. Let me make clear my own situated knowledge and position: I am a fierce defender of human rights, including the rights of trans people to full and unqualified humanity. I find the idea of “Team TERF” to be violently misguided at best. I refuse to debate the validity of trans lives or self-identification related to gender identity and sexual orientation.
I want to start from the end of Chappelle’s show. If his purpose really is to promote conversation (as he claims), he makes a crucial mistake. The Closer is one of those titles with several meanings; Chappelle says this is the last comedy special he will do “for a minute”. But a “closer” is also a joke or bit used by a comedian to end a performance. And the closer of The Closer is a doozy.
He tells — using the heartbreaking detail that makes good comedy so special — the story of his transgender comedian colleague Daphne Dorman, who died by suicide after defending him on Twitter and “being dragged” by other trans folks. Chappelle admits: “I don’t know if was them dragging or I don’t know what was going on in her life but I bet dragging her didn’t help.” I will return to this question of online “dragging” and how hard it is to discuss things online. (Members of Dorman’s family, incidentally, have spoken out in defense of Chappelle and referred to him as an “LGBTQ ally”.)
Ending with this story is a mistake, because it’s the most important point Chappelle is trying to make: The humanity of people involved in this discussion should not be up for question. (This is my paraphrase of his words.) It’s a powerful point, made in a powerful way. It doesn’t prove that “Team TERF” is a legitimate position worthy of discussion, and it actually disproves whatever point he’s trying to make about hypersensitivity or whatever. But no one can listen to Daphne’s story and not be moved. (Responding right away with “Yeah it’s sad, but…” is problematic to say the least.)
I know that the standard approach to persuasive argumentation is to end with your strongest point. But as Saeed Jones points out in GQ, many folks have turned the show off long before Chappelle mentions Daphne’s name. (I watched three of his other specials, getting more and more frustrated — and bored — with his anti-trans commentary. I came very close to skipping The Closer, and I don’t think that would have been a mistake.)
So here, near the top of my piece, is my most important point: “Team TERF” does not promote (or deserve) conversation. It is an attempt to delegitimize transgenderism itself. If someone can explain to me how “Team TERF” is different from “Team Gay Conversion Therapy”, I’m all ears. In both cases, queer people are being told: “Your understanding of yourself is not valid, and we are going to force you to live at odds with your own identity, regardless of the harm it causes.” And as others have made clear, that harm includes the lives of trans people, especially trans youth and trans people of color.
Some members of “Team TERF” have accused trans activists and their allies of shutting down conversation about transgenderism. I think that’s true in some cases, but I think there’s a good reason for it. The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, and the US Supreme Court ruled to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013. If we use these imprecise milestones for reference, we can say that gay men and lesbian women (and their allies) endured a 63-year “conversation” about their existence and sexual identities, before the heteronormative society was forced into some measure of consciousness. During that time, they watched in horror as countless loved ones, friends, family members, girlfriends, boyfriends, sons, daughters, and comrades were killed by HIV/AIDS, suicide, and hate crimes.
Perhaps trans people are unwilling to endure similar suffering and death during a conversation about their lives. I don’t know, and I don’t want to speak for anyone. But that’s how it looks to me. That’s why I’m generally unwilling to debate the matter with “Team TERF”.
I say “generally unwilling”, because I hate to shut down conversation about anything. Like Grace Lee Boggs, I believe in the transformative power of dialogue and dialectical analysis. I have a long history of discussing difficult topics with people of different backgrounds and ideologies, and few things make me happier than finding common ground with someone of a different ideological orientation.
Of course, this is a product of privilege. One reason I have the luxury to discuss various difficult topics is because I have some distance from them. When your life or well-being is under assault, it’s tough (or impossible) to remain civil during such discussions. Nor should you be expected to! We wouldn’t expect Holocaust survivors to remain calm while someone claims their ancestors weren’t really killed in Nazi death camps, would we? Of course not. We wouldn’t expect the descendants of enslaved Africans to stay calm while white supremacists claim slavery wasn’t so bad, right? Some things aren’t even worth discussing. I don’t see much value in trying to explain why the world is round, or why birds are real.
In his 2014 book Just Mercy, attorney Bryan Stevenson says on p. 96: “This one massive miscarriage of justice had afflicted the whole community with despair and made it hard for me to be dispassionate.” I feel the same way when discussing the question of trans rights. I’ve had quite a few trans students, and they suffer when “Team TERF” spouts their nonsense. Rates of suicide (and attempted suicide) among trans youth are shockingly high. It’s easy to discuss these things when you don’t know many trans people. I know — and care deeply about — quite a few. Stevenson also quotes his grandmother on p. 14: “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance. You have to get close.”
This brings me to stand-up comedy, an art form I have always loved. Although I don’t often get close to comedians (aside from a few shows at comedy clubs), the comedy albums I’ve listened to have helped me feel close to other communities. For my entire life, I have felt deeply indebted to comedians of many types — but especially stand-up comics — for helping me understand the world better. George Carlin taught me powerful things about language. Paul Mooney taught me important things about race. Bill Hicks taught me valuable lessons about how power and propaganda function. Wanda Sykes taught me vital things about what it means to be a gay black woman in the US. With their cavalier forms of freedom, stand-up comedians have the ability to smuggle deep meanings into our brains alongside the silly fart jokes.
I’ve always been fascinated by the heterodox potential of comedy, from Monty Python to Hothead Paisan to Calvin & Hobbes to The Boondocks. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For helped me understand the struggles and situations of lesbian women, even though I knew I was only getting a tiny glimpse. These works of art made me laugh and made me think; they blend high and low art, catharsis and provocation.
This, I believe, is what Dave Chappelle has always tried to do with his comedy. At his best, Chappelle has used comedy to strike at the heart of white supremacy and other social hierarchies. Chappelle’s Show was a landmark series because it found intelligent ways to satirize absurdities. He poked fun at himself while never letting oppressors off the hook. As others have pointed out, Chappelle’s Show always “punched up” — targeting systems of power and the people controlling them. His stand-up comedy used to do this, too. Now, in The Closer, Chappelle says he doesn’t know what it means to “punch down” on trans people.
He also uses the exhausting (and tired) “hey it’s just jokes” approach. Under this framework, we’re not allowed to take anything said by a comedian too seriously, because it’s “just a joke”. I’ve heard students use this defense when making jokes that are racist, sexist, Islamophobic, hateful toward LGBTQ folks, and atrocious for other reasons. Chappelle says over and over that the ability of a joke to produce laughs is the only thing that matters. He got along with Daphne because she enjoyed his jokes, regardless of who they targeted. But that’s simplistic at best and idiotic at worst. If I had a black friend who found racist jokes hilarious, would that justify my telling them? Of course not.
In the wider culture, this concept of “just jokes” has become an attempt to evade responsibility for indefensible positions of all kinds. If the audience is receptive, the person claims victory; if not, they’re “just kidding”. And it’s everywhere. Trump and his MAGA crowd use this reasoning all the time. The PBS Frontline documentary series Documenting Hate features a confrontation with a white-supremacist who attended the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. When asked about his willingness to march with neo-Nazis, he actually says: “It’s a joke, you know.” When I expressed horror at Eminem’s violently misogynistic song “Kim” from The Marshall Mathers LP, my middle school students laughed and said: “Yeah that song’s hilarious.”
I no longer have respect for the “just jokes” framework, because it suggests that comedic material — and by extension other art forms like movies, novels, music, video games, and poetry — don’t matter. But of course they matter. Art defines and informs our ideologies, our worldviews. Art helps us make sense of the chaos around us; it helps us define the strange phenomena and myriad creatures.
Artists have responsibilities to their listeners and themselves. Maya Angelou said in 1983 that one of her responsibilities as a writer to “be as good a human being as I possibly can be so that once I have achieved control of the language, I don’t force my weaknesses on a public who might then pick them up and abuse themselves.” I think many people in the 21st century — comedians and everybody else — need to reflect on this concept.
Of course comedians don’t mean everything they say on stage; hyperbole and exaggeration are necessary tools for every comedian. But when the audience cannot find your actual point, something has gone horribly wrong — or you’re no longer conversing in good faith.
Fortunately, some comedians are working to expand the nature of stand-up entertainment. Hannah Gadsby leads the charge here; her special Nanette broke revolutionary ground in the deconstruction of comedic patterns and expectations. Neal Brennan (who worked on Chappelle’s Show back in the day) also did important new things with his Three Mics special. Bo Burnham’s musical masterpiece Inside pushes the boundaries of how humor and painful reflections can intermix. This, I think, is the direction comedy needs to go. No one is confused about what Gadsby or Burnham really mean, even while they use the standard comedy special format to infuse their reflections with precisely-timed humor. Rather than blur lines and confuse their audiences, they challenge the standard forms of comedy to expand those lines and clarify things.
Dave Chappelle isn’t challenging anything in The Closer, and he’s not expanding or clarifying very much. If he wants to make points about white supremacy, he’s not making them well in my opinion. (Keep in mind, I love comedians like Paul Mooney and Wanda Sykes, who regularly critique racism and oblivious white folks.)
To give Chappelle his due, the point about angry groups on Twitter causing harm to his friend is an important one. I hate the way swarms of people pile on each other to roast those with whom they disagree. I wish Twitter could be a more civil and humane place, where we discuss this stuff (or not) without driving people into desperation. I don’t know exactly what kind of hate Daphne received on Twitter, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suspect that it contributed to her suicide. And there’s no excuse for that. We can shut down conversations without being wretched or cruel.
Let’s be clear: those who are most at risk from bullying online are marginalized people, especially trans folk and women and people of color. Anita Sarkeesian can write volumes about the atrocious forms of hate visited on her during the “GamerGate” brouhaha (and ever since). The journalist Maria Ressa, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, once said she got an average of 90 hate-filled tweets every hour. I could go on and on.
More to the point, “jokes” like the ones in The Closer are part of that bullying. Chappelle is contributing to exactly the same kind of cruelty he claims to be opposing. The difference is he’s doing it on a stage (with his real name attached, to be fair, which usually doesn’t happen on Twitter). The main difference with Daphne is that she liked his jokes. And as I’ve said, that’s an absurd oversimplification. Would he be indifferent to her suicide if she had not been a fan of his?
As many folks wiser than myself have said, online communication suffers from the anonymity and carelessness bred by the emotional and physical distance created by screens. It’s easy to bully people when you don’t see their full humanity. It’s easy to say “just ignore the trolls” when you’re not being bombarded by their hatred. I’ve had some groups of people mock me on Twitter — in fairly minor ways, I should add — and it hurts. No one likes being the target of such vitriol and bile.
I’ve had some nasty exchanges on Twitter with my friend Robin (who convinced me to watch The Closer). We have a lot in common, but our political ideologies are pretty far apart. Still, I believe we can (and should) sit down to speak face to face (via Zoom, since he lives in a different country) to have a civil conversation. It’s tempting to write off or block those who disagree in hostile ways, and I don’t blame those who do. Each of us must do what’s necessary to protect ourselves and keep ourselves mentally healthy. (Anita Sarkeesian has no responsibility to engage with the trolls sending her death threats, for example.)
Whenever possible, though, I want to believe that 95% of humans are not beyond hope. I believe we can reach people with authentic, good-faith engagement. As Sarah Schulman says in the title of her 2016 book, Conflict Is Not Abuse. On page 17 she says: “Conscious awareness of these political and emotional mechanisms [conflating conflict and abuse] gives us all a chance to face ourselves, to achieve recognition and understanding in order to avoid escalation towards unnecessary pain.” On page 28 she adds: “Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.”
This communication is not easy, nor is it convenient — especially on the stage of social media, where egos and ideologies so easily cloud our vision. But I write and speak because I want to affirm those who agree with me, and dialogue with those who disagree. If you’re willing to speak in good faith, and keep yourself intellectually honest, let’s talk.
Maybe we can leave the jokes aside when things get serious.
