You pays your money and you takes your choice

It's okay if you don't laugh

I finally saw that Dave Chappelle “Sticks and Stones” show that everyone is talking about — you know, the one that’s supposed to be so [asshole voice] politically incorrect — and I kinda-sorta get what the big deal is. Since coming back from his apparent nervous breakdown over the late, lamented Chappelle Show and the way people were taking his frequent references to stereotypical black behavior and the N-word (i.e., nigger) as endorsements of rather than as criticisms of racism, Chappelle has been working the Truth-Teller angle. Which is okay — for Chappelle, an extremely traditional comedian as far as joke-telling goes, truth-telling really is an angle, and not one that gets too much in the way of his gags.

In “Sticks and Stones” (GET IT?), Chappelle, true to recent form, does a bunch of facile reversals very obviously meant to call y’all out. He even does a derp “impression” of the Atlanta audience before whom he’s performing. According to this impression, they — and we — and always lying in wait, shitty little phones at the ready, hoping to get Chappelle in trouble for being [sorry, this always gets asshole voice] politically incorrect.

Also Chappelle is persecuted by The Man, or rather The Woman: There’s a bit where he gets called up before the lady from network standards and practices, who won’t let him say “faggot” on his show, and he asks her, “Why is it that I can say the word ‘nigger’ with impunity, but I can’t say the word ‘faggot’?”

[Chappelle yells FAGGOT! really loud because the word — like “bitch” and, for that matter, “nigger” — is fun to say loud, I guess.]

The lady (who, Dave tells us, is actually cool, and actually pretty fair — there are many such qualifiers in the act; he also wants us to know that he loves everybody) says, in the simpering sort of voice used by male comedians to indicate that a woman is talking, “Because, David, you are not gay.” “I said, ‘well, Renee,’” rejoins Chappelle, “‘I'm not a nigger either.’”

I laughed, and the crowd cheered. But you think more than two seconds about it and it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Still, I did laugh. Such reversals work gangbusters in the hands of a competent operator, and Chappelle is not just competent but a genuine master — you can tell how hard he worked the material to get it so smooth, and you can see sturdy professionalism in the callbacks that pros like him inevitably use — e.g. “shoot everyone in my school” — and in the little timing tricks he pulls, with strategic laughter (you don’t think he starts cracking up because the act he’s run hundreds of times suddenly strikes him as funny, do you?), sudden changes of subject, etc. And Lord how that man can handle a noisy cell phone in the audience.

And as for Chappelle’s “punching down,” about which I have heard complaints: Have you ever seen his act? He’s the guy who suggested that, if black folks got reparations, not a few of the brothers would spend their cut on shit like a truckload of Kools. A large part of his streetwise persona is about punching down, taking advantage of the weak, because that’s what streetrats do to stay alive. The fact that he is now rich changes his circumstances but not his philosophy. Like the bit where he haggles down the price of a blowjob from a junkie — which is like the ultimate punching down. We’re just accustomed to accept that, like 19th Century audiences accepted Peck’s Bad Boy or 1990s audiences accepted Adam Sandler.

One thing I’ll say: Even when it’s bitchy — and the portrayal of LGBT people as riders uncomfortably sharing the same car is RuPaul-level bitchy — for the most part Chappelle’s material is not actually cruel; it may be “hurtful,” and it may actually hurt, but it could, conceivably, be something you would say about a friend because you love him but there’s this thing he does etc.

Well, except the stuff about the heroin addicts. Chappelle knows you don’t give a fuck what happens to them. But he knows what his audience thinks of gay people et alia, and as a professional he is not going to make the mistake of letting his paying guests and folks out there in TV land think he has any serious beef with “the alphabet people” except that they made his friend lose that Oscar gig, or that he has any beef with women except they made his other friend, who likes to masturbate in their presence, apologize and take several months off from comedy, etc. (Just kidding — you've been watching Chappelle for years so you already knew he had waaaay more beef with women than that.)

To me the professional detachment is the best thing about Chappelle’s act and what makes it possible for me to enjoy it. Of course, he’s gone out of his way not to give my white ass a hard time, which may have something to do with it.

And I think that detachment is also why, while some of the dumber rightwingers like Ben Shapiro and Dinesh D’Souza have been cheering Chappelle as if he were the second coming of Al Bundy, less cheesy wingnuts like Michael Brendan Dougherty and Kyle Smith have taken more of a confused tone about the act — because they know Chappelle, even though he yells the forbidden words they long to yell, isn’t really on their side.

Smith, the garbage critic for the National Review, it almost as dumb as Shapiro and D’Souza, and actually does a rightwing version of what he and all these guys pretend to see in “woke” objectors to the show — like when Chappelle says black people saw through Jussie Smollett right away, Smith actually muses, “that seems a bit off; Al Sharpton and many other prominent black Americans publicly backed Smollett.” The comedy clinic of Kyle Smith, ladies and germs!

But Dougherty, a National Review theocrat, is sadder still, because he’s so close: after pathetically trying to portray Chappelle’s POV as “pro-life,” Dougherty says:

I suspect Chappelle wants to make the bulk of his traditional audience more sane and light-hearted about comedy, not seek out an entirely new audience of people like us.

“People like us” — that’s a telling observation; almost an admission that, were conservatives to really take Chappelle up, they’d soon find him doing a turnaround on them, and be obliged by their nature to explode into snarling grievance and wounded betrayal, as they do now when any Republican criticizes Trump.

So, there’s my review. I hope you get some laughs from Chappelle’s show, because we all need whatever laughs we can get, but if you can’t I wouldn’t judge you for it. Because if there’s one thing stupider and more totalitarian than trying to bully someone out of laughing at something, it’s trying to bully them into laughing at it.