Dave Chappelle does the opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live."

Here it is, from last night, all 17 minutes:

"The dreariest aspects of the 'woke' movement are partisanship, outrage, victimhood and an obsessively political view of the world."

"But just as politically correct comedians trade on stories of their own oppression, anti-woke comedians now delight in referencing their own cancellations — Gervais and Chappelle’s shows are full of tales about people who have attacked them on the internet and in real life.... The outrage of woke comedians at the immorality of their enemies is echoed by the ceaseless outrage of anti-woke comedians at the absurdity and stupidity of their enemies. Comedy should offend. Comedians should speak freely.... But offensiveness is not synonymous with wit. And the best comedy is anarchic, not partisan. Surprising, not predictable. The antidote to an age of political polarisation and outrage is not more of the same. That men as talented as Chappelle and Gervais have succumbed to the temptation is a testament to just how powerful those forces are."

Writes James Marriott, in "Sorry, anti-woke comedians, the joke is on you/The problem with Ricky Gervais is not that he’s outrageous, it’s that he’s not outrageous enough" (London Times).

Yes, having watched the new Netflix shows from Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, I think this criticism is apt.

"Right now, I’m in trouble because the Jewish community is upset. But I cannot express this enough: No matter what you read..."

"... about that show in Boston, you will never see quotation marks around anything I said. They don’t know what I said. It’s all hearsay.... The other night, I said something about Palestine in Boston and got misquoted all over the world... And I will not repeat what I said." 

Said Dave Chappelle, at a show in Raleigh, N.C., quoted in "Dave Chappelle Laments ‘Nightmare’ Facing Israelis and Palestinians/The comedian, whose remarks about the Israel-Hamas war last week made headlines, returned to the subject at a show in North Carolina" (NYT).

"Laughter itself has fragmented. Just listen to it: You’ve got your gurgling, impotent The Late Show With Stephen Colbert laughter over here..."

"... you’ve got your harsh and barkingly energized Trumpist laughter over there; you’ve got your free-floating Joe Rogan–podcast yuks; and then you’ve got the private snuffling and seizurelike sounds that you yourself make when you’re watching Jay Jurden Instagram clips alone, on your phone, with your earbuds in. And for most of us, behind all of this, the feeling that we’re whistling past the graveyard: that the sludge is rising, politically; that the bullyboys are cracking their knuckles; that we’re 'just kind of half-waiting,' as Marc Maron put it in a recent HBO special, 'for the stupids to choose a uniform.' How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where Jordan Peterson, who wouldn’t know a good joke if it ran him over, is instructing us on the importance of comedy as a defense against totalitarianism, while Dave Chappelle—one of the funniest men alive—burns up his comic capital defending his right to be mean about trans people?"

Writes James Parker, in "Comedians Only Care About Comedy/A new book cured me of any attachment to the idea of the stand-up as truth-telling philosophe" (The Atlantic).

"What the f—k happened to this place?"

Said Dave Chappelle, as quoted in "'What the f—k happened to this place?': Dave Chappelle rails on San Francisco at surprise show SFGATE culture editor Dan Gentile saw the controversial comedian's last-minute San Francisco set" (SFGate).

He told a story about eating at an Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin a few nights earlier, only to have someone defecate in front of the restaurant as he was walking in. San Francisco has become “half ‘Glee,’ half zombie movie,” he said, and he remarked that the whole city is the Tenderloin now. “Y’all [N-words] need a Batman!” he exclaimed. 

He wasn’t aware of the incident of a business owner hosing down a homeless person and had to have the crowd explain it. He pivoted quickly, saying he now remembered watching the video on YouTube … a hundred times. The misdirection was followed by a cruel snicker and a trademark slap of the mic against his thigh....

"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."

I'm reading "Are French People Just Lazy?" by the historian Robert Zaretsky (NYT).

The power of boo.

Chappelle introduced him as the richest man in the world and the crowd booed him so hard they altered reality https://t.co/Vo20vTed1i

— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) December 12, 2022

What was Elon Musk doing at a Dave Chappelle concert?

 

Chappelle tries to improvise his way through the booing, but what the hell? Why should a comedy audience appreciate a non-comedy guest cameo on the stage? Was there some sort of reliance on the idea that Musk is a free-speech hero, so the crowd would cheer? 

Gizmodo describes the scene — and quoted Musk's tweet about it: "Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter). It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists... but nahhh."

"Everybody calls me like, ‘You see Dave on 'SNL'?... Well, he normalized antisemitism with the monologue.'"

"I don’t know if you’ve been on comment sections on most news articles, but it’s pretty f-----g normal. As you know, it’s incredibly normal. But the one thing I will say is I don’t believe that censorship and penalties are the way to end antisemitism or to gain understanding. I don’t believe in that. It’s the wrong way for us to approach it.... Dave said something in the 'SNL' monologue that I thought was constructive, which, 'It shouldn’t be this hard to talk about things.' And that's what we're talking about. Whether it be comedy or discussion or anything else, if we don’t have the wherewithal to meet each other with what’s reality, then how do we move forward?"

Said Jon Stewart, quoted in "Jerry Seinfeld says 'subject matter' of Dave Chappelle's 'SNL' monologue 'calls for a conversation'/Chappelle's opening routine on last weekend's episode of 'SNL' has been criticized for 'normalizing antisemitism'" (Fox News).

The headline writer must really not like Jon Stewart... or maybe he just didn't read the bottom half of the article. If you're curious what Seinfeld said, it was much more distanced and wary: "I did think the comedy was well-executed, but I think the subject matter calls for a conversation that I don’t think I’d want to have in this venue." That's three "I thinks"s in one sentence.

Perhaps that wariness is more indicative of genuine fear of anti-Semitism. But Seinfeld, it seems, has always stayed in neutral territory, and social and political discord is Stewart's milieu.

"Dave [Chappelle] does a fake monologue during the dress rehearsal, because he doesn’t want [‘SNL’ creator] Lorne Michaels, or anyone else, to know what his real monologue is."

A "source" told Page Six.

Dave Chappelle hosted "SNL" last night. Here's the monologue.

There's a lot of talk about Kanye West. Chappelle takes a cagey position, neither attacking him nor supporting him: "I don't think Kanye is crazy.... He's possibly not well."

Then there's a long pause and an extended run-up to a big leap: "I've been to Hollywood." Pause. "I don't want y'all to get mad at me. I'm just telling you. I've been to Hollywood. This is just what I saw." Pause. "It's a lot of Jews." Pause. "Like a lot."

"But that doesn't mean anything." That's a setup. Punchline: "There's a lot of black people in Ferguson, Missouri. That doesn't mean they run the place."

It's not a crazy thing to think: "The Jews run show business." Pause. "But it's a crazy thing to say out loud." He said out loud. 

And that was the end of the Kanye and anti-Semitism portion of the monologue, very carefully written and delivered. That was halfway point, and he paused after saying the "crazy thing" out loud, and started talking about the midterm elections. Hershel Walker: "I don't want to speak bad of him — because he's black, but, um" — pause — "He's observably stupid."

Chappelle hears people saying the Trump Era is over, but he needs to explain something that he knows, because he lives in Ohio, "amongst the poor whites." Trump is loved. And the reason he is loved is because people have never seen anything like him: "an honest liar."

In its article about Dave Chappelle, The Washington Post changes "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people" and makes no note of the correction.

I'm just noticing this now, as I review the comments on yesterday's post, which has a title that quotes the first paragraph of the WaPo article, "Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic [sic] jokes...." 

I added the "sic" and reinforced my criticism by quoting one of the comments at WaPo:

... backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic jokes.

You've just accepted the criticism of Chappelle at face value, I see. Personally, if I'd been editing this, I would have changed it to "jokes perceived by some as transphobic." Or maybe even "jokes involving transsexuals." 

By stating it as you have, you've sided with his critics in, not an opinion column, but what is ostensibly an objective news story. Nice job, WAPO.  

I wrote, "Do I need a '[sic]' after 'transsexual'?" because I think "transgender" is the preferred term, but other than that, I think that comment said it well. 

WaPo has now changed "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people." 

I've added an update to my original post, and I'll repeat my criticism that this was an important, substantive change correcting a shameful journalistic mistake. It should be acknowledged forthrightly, with assurance that the paper will pay attention and make an effort to avoid repeating this mistake.

I want to see a "CORRECTION" notice on this article!

"Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic [sic] jokes...."

"'To staff, artists, and our community, we hear you and we are sorry,' First Avenue said in a statement, which was posted to social media less than three hours before the show was scheduled to begin. 'We know we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, and we know we let you down. We are not just a black box with people in it, and we understand that First Ave is not just a room, but meaningful beyond our walls.' The storied venue, which is best known for its appearances in Prince’s 1984 film 'Purple Rain,' added that while it believes in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, 'we lost sight of the impact' booking Chappelle would have on the community.... ...First Avenue said Chappelle’s show was moved to the Varsity Theater, where all tickets for the performance would be honored. Chappelle had already been scheduled to perform at the Varsity Theater on Thursday and Friday. "

 

WaPo reports.

"All the kids were screaming and yelling. I remember, I said to the kids, I go, 'Well, OK, well, what do you guys think I did wrong?'"

"And a line formed. These kids said everything about gender, and this and that and the other, but they didn’t say anything about art.... And this is my biggest gripe with this whole controversy with 'The Closer': That you cannot report on an artist’s work and remove artistic nuance from his words. It would be like if you were reading a newspaper and they say, 'Man Shot In The Face By a Six-Foot Rabbit Expected To Survive,' you’d be like, 'Oh my god,’ and they never tell you it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon.... When I heard those talking points coming out of these children’s faces, that really, sincerely, hurt me. Because I know those kids didn’t come up with those words. I’ve heard those words before. The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it... And it has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right, my freedom, of artistic expression. That is valuable to me. That is not severed from me. It’s worth protecting for me, and it’s worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions.... And these kids didn’t understand that they were instruments of oppression. And I didn’t get mad at them.... They’re kids. They’re freshmen. They’re not ready yet. They don’t know."

Said Dave Chappelle, quoted in "Dave Chappelle special quietly released on Netflix, defends trans jokes" (NY Post). I need to watch this immediately.

UPDATE, 8:59 a.m.: I just watched it.

"y’all ever hear ~12,000 people laugh at a transphobic joke, while you’re a trans person in the audience who didn’t know..."

"... the transphobic comedian would make a surprise appearance at the John Mulaney show? yeah. wasn’t fun. fuck you D.C."

Tweeted someone named "rae (spookiest version)," quoted in "John Mulaney Draws Criticism for Having Dave Chappelle Open, Tell ‘Transphobic Jokes’ at Ohio Show." 

That's in Variety, and I appreciate its putting "transphobic jokes" in quotation marks, but I think we need to see the actual jokes. I'm just going to assume that this was more material like what we saw in "The Closer," which some people characterized as transphobic and others did not. 

And there is something odd about going to see one comedian and getting surprised by the appearance of somebody you would actively boycott because you see him as picking on people like you. You're sitting there in a big group of people with whom you were expecting to feel camaraderie, and there they are, all around you, laughing, and you're thrown into a horrible feeling of alienation, which isn't what you paid your money for and what you anticipated as you went out for a good time that night.

Should comedians make people uncomfortable? That's asking the question at a high level of generality. Maybe comedians should make people uncomfortable but only the people who are too comfortable and never at the expense of the people who are already uncomfortable. 

And maybe audiences who pay to see a comedian who doesn't deal in discomfort should be spared being subjected to a comedian who does. Variety says John Mulaney "tends to stay away from political or social issues" — whatever that means. So maybe this is a case of that. People who expected not to get challenged got challenged. 

Mulaney obviously chose to do that to his crowd, so readjust what you think of his tendencies. Why did he inflict Dave Chappelle on his audience? He had to want to do that. 

ADDED: TMZ gives some idea of one of the jokes. You know how Chappelle was attacked on stage by a man who was carrying a knife that folded up into a fake gun: 

 

Chappelle seems to have called that "a gun that identifies as a knife" (or was it "a knife that identifies as a gun"?)

Dave Chappelle attacked on stage.

#davechappelle attacked at #hollywoodbowl #netflixisajoke pic.twitter.com/oP04S0de90

— abazar 🦇🔊 (@abazar) May 4, 2022

Deadline reports: "Dave Chappelle Attacked Onstage While Performing During Netflix Is A Joke Festival At The Hollywood Bowl." 

In one posted clip, apparently after the incident, Chappelle is heard to quip, “It was a trans man,” a reference to his own transphobic comments in his Netflix special The Closer and the uproar, protests and anger that ensued....

Another person caught the end of the show on video where Chappelle and Jamie Foxx, who apparently rushed onstage to help apprehend the man going after Chappelle....“I thought that was part of the show,” Foxx is heard to respond.

“I grabbed the back of that N*****’s head,” said Chappelle. “His hair was spongey!”

There are also reports that "Chris Rock, who performed earlier, came on stage w/ him & joked: 'Was that Will Smith?'" 

After the Will Smith incident at the Oscars, there was a lot of talk about whether it would inspire other attacks on performers, whose vulnerability on stage had been so vividly exposed.

2 quotes — heard by me in the last 24 hours — that use the concept of the audition.

1. "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition." — John Lennon, spoken at the end of The Beatles last public performance, quoted in "The story of the Beatles rooftop concert at the heart of ‘Get Back’" (WaPo)." (I heard this last night as I took in the final hour of the 8-hour Peter Jackson documentary, which I have now watched, in its entirety, twice.)

2. "I cannot believe you would make me audition for you. You look like clowns. I am not bluffing." — Dave Chappelle, quoted in "SEE IT: Dave Chappelle criticizes affordable housing plan before Ohio village votes against it" (Daily News). (I heard this today because the incident occurred on Monday and the story was prominent in the news today.)

Lennon was being comically humble, exiting the stage as if the band were tiny when it was the biggest band the world has ever known (and it still is, more than half a century later). As you may know, because I've said it before, the jokes that delight me the most play with the idea of big and small, and this little line of John's falls roughly in that category (understood broadly (not narrowly!)). 

Chappelle, who is specifically a comedian, was dead serious, and he meant to appear as large as possible as he spoke at a Yellow Springs village council meeting, where he intended to intimidate the council into voting the way that suited his real estate interests. For him, the concept of the audition meant something that was beneath him. Everyone is supposed to know who he is, how great he is, and how much is owed to him.

"When [Barbara] Walters asked her where she’d be had she not changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg, she replied 'I would have been a Tupperware lady.'"

"It seems that Caryn Johnson saw value in appearing to be Jewish.... So, is it racist to pretend to be Jewish if one isn’t? Is it ‘cultural appropriation’?... Perhaps Whoopi does have some distant shred of Jewish heritage buried far back in her family tree.... Minorities are often granted licence to joke about their own... If Whoopi had been better connected to her putative Judaism, she might have thought twice about her festive jumper design aimed at Jews, depicting a ‘Jewish’ octopus wearing a kippah. Most Goldbergs I’ve met know that Jewish Octopuses are usually associated with Nazi era antisemitism. Not Whoopi. When it comes to racism, it’s not only Jews Whoopi has angered. When she was dating the comedian Ted Danson in 1993, he nearly ended his career by appearing in blackface in a sketch at the Friars Club comedy event, which was reported to have included jokes about how he got her to clean his parents’ house, contained numerous full occurrences of the “N word” and ended with him eating from a tray of watermelon. The gags didn’t go down well with the 3,000 strong audience.... She’s said to have come out on stage to challenge the audience, saying: 'N*****, n*****, n*****, whitey, whitey, whitey! It takes a lot of courage to come out in blackface in front of 3000 [people]. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!'"

Writes Jonathan Sacerdoti in "Will the real Whoopi Goldberg please stand up? Is Caryn Johnson really Jewish? And would it make any difference if she was?" (The Jewish Chronicle).

***

You can see a photo of that "festive jumper" in this 2016 Haaretz article, "Will Jews Buy a Sweater Featuring an Octopus Menorah? Whoopi Goldberg Thinks So Goldberg's 'Christmas sweaters with a twist' seek to include her Jewish friends in the holidays, but use a cute version of an animal often used in anti-Semitic tropes."

Here, at the Holocaust Encyclopedia, you can see the well-known Nazi era cartoon depicting Jews as an octopus that is destroying the entire world. 

***

Goldberg said "I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!" in 1993, but in recent years she's been entrenched in a long-running group project on network daytime TV that supports and mildly challenges nice American ladies who want to think well of themselves. I'd love to see her quit the show and get back to the woman-alone-on-stage shows that first made her famous. 

Maybe she's too comfortable with "The View," but "The View" wasn't sufficiently comfortable with her. Comfort is overrated, and it deserves a particularly low rating in comedy. It's the enemy of comedy. Goldberg could build a one-woman show around this incident, and that's what I'd like to see. Take the time to look at the problem from multiple angles and bring us somewhere surprising. That's what Dave Chappelle does with his very independent shows.

I'm sorry, but I don't really know who Patton Oswalt is — I've never needed to know (the name looks familiar) — but I care about Dave Chappelle, so I'm reading...

... "Patton Oswalt explains himself after ‘nice’ Dave Chappelle post goes sideways" in the L.A. Times. I haven't even read the article yet — I'm going to "live blog" my reading of it — but I should disclose that I'm already in my What-a-weasel! mode.

... Both comics were performing at Seattle Center venues Friday night — Oswalt at 3,000-seat McCaw Hall and Chappelle at 17,500-seat Climate Pledge Arena. Chappelle invited his longtime buddy over to do a guest set, after which Oswalt posted.... “Finished me set at @mccawhall and got a text from @davechappelle... Come over to the arena he’s performing in next door and do a guest set. Why not? I waved good-bye to this hell-year with a genius I started comedy with 34 years ago. He works an arena like he’s talking to one person and charming their skin off. Anyway, I ended the year with a real friend and a deep laugh. Can’t ask for much more.”

This was supposedly Oswalt being "nice." No, it wasn't! It was Oswalt bragging about his connection to the much greater star. It was enthusiastic self-promotion. He had to already know Chappelle's difficulties with a certain sector of Wokedom and must be deemed to have consciously decided to take the risk. He had to have done a cost-benefit analysis. Do not tell me this weasel did a turnaround when he heard the actual — as opposed to the predictable — outcry. 

Yeah, I'm saying don't tell me. That's because I think I already know. The next day on Instagram, Oswalt is all:

"During a Q&A session, one student stepped to the mic and called Chappelle a 'bigot,' adding, 'I’m 16 and I think you’re childish, you handled it like a child'...."

"Chappelle responded... 'My friend, with all due respect, I don’t believe you could make one of the decisions I have to make on a given day.' That peeved some students who were hoping for an apology or some semblance of one from Chappelle.... [A]nother student in the audience shouted at him, 'Your comedy kills,' and Chappelle shot back, 'N------ are killed every day.' He then asked, 'The media’s not here, right?'... The two students we spoke to declined to go on the record out of fear of retribution from the school. The father of one of the students, who also declined to speak publicly to protect the identity of his daughter, said, 'As a parent, I have to say I have a real problem. … He was being dead serious and using the n-word on the record. What kind of judgment is the school showing to allow that?'... [T]he Chappelle spokesperson, responded: 'They are complaining that he talked and said the n-word. If anything, Dave is putting the school on the map.'... [The spokesperson] said Chappelle was expecting forgiveness from students.... 'He said these kids deserve an F for forgiveness.... Give them some space to grow. They are going to say things that are immature.'"

From "POLITICO Playbook: A Dave Chappelle Thanksgiving special." Chappelle made a surprise appearance at his alma mater the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

I note that a student called him "childish" and his spokesperson called the students "immature."