"The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects. When the light off the Reflecting Pool bounced up onto Lincoln's face, it looked as if a flashlight had been held up under his chin."

Wrote Sarah Vowell, back in 2005, in her very entertaining book "Assassination Vacation," which I recently reread. The link goes to an excerpt of the book at the NPR website. There's also audio of Vowell reading her text, which she does extremely well.

Here's more context:

"[Daniel Chester] French obsessed for years about how to sculpt Lincoln's peculiar face, fretting and reading and thinking before committing to the brooding, seated philosopher in the memorial. He received the commission in 1913. So by the time the memorial was finally dedicated nine years later, the sculptor was a little pent up worrying how his work would come off. Hoping to celebrate, French looked upon the final installation with horror. The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects.

"I told my lawyer, I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing that.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, you’ll be in contempt of court’ and this and that."

"I go, ‘OK. Well, how about this? I dare the judge to put me in jail for not wanting to visit [my] abusive father. I actually, I’m gonna double down on that. I double-dare him to arrest the most famous kid in the world."

Said Macaulay Culkin, quoted in "Macaulay Culkin makes scathing remarks about estranged ‘narcissistic’ dad Kit" (NY Post).

"Chappelle retains his killer timing and raconteur’s charms, but... he seems more interested in seeking the clapter of like-minded patrons than anything else."

"The comedian sells his self-centered worldview, hard: [Michael] Jackson didn’t molest any kids, because the singer didn’t target a prime candidate like Macaulay Culkin. [Louis] C.K. didn’t do anything wrong, because exposing himself to female colleagues isn’t a crime worthy of reporting to the police. The opioid crisis makes him understand how white people felt during the crack epidemic, because 'I don’t care, either.'"

From "Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones Fights for the Rights of the Already-Powerful/In his new Netflix special, Chappelle rushes to the defense of the people who need it most: celebrities" by Inkoo Kang (in Slate).

"Clapter" is not a typo. In the text at Slate, the word is linked to "The Rise of 'Clapter' Comedy" (at Vulture). That's from January 2018, and you'll see Chapelle's name comes up:

[T]his portmanteau [of clapping and laughter]—evidently coined by Seth Meyers over a decade ago— to bemoan an identifiable strain of message-driven comedy that inadvertently prioritizes political pandering above comedic merit....

Monologue segments have turned into a series of repetitive jokes, middling impressions, and verbatim tweet recitals, but they nonetheless continue to elicit enthusiastic reactions from crowds, who can relate broadly to the overarching sentiment of “Holy shit, our president is bad.”

It’s telling, then, that one of the highest-profile examples of this phenomenon took place during Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue the weekend immediately following Trump’s election. “America has done it; we’ve actually elected an internet troll as our president,” Chappelle said, parroting a well-wrought observation that had been made thousands of times leading up to the election. Even accounting for his comedy chops, it was a tepid and unoriginal joke that had every reason to fall flat. The crowd nonetheless laughed heartily, evidently looking for anything to latch their very palpable Trump resentment onto....