Dave Chappelle’s Netlix special “The Closer” has been out for a bit now, but each passing day brings it with fresh outrage from social justice warriors who refuse to just sit back and allow Chappelle to make jokes at their expense.
Writer and poet Saeed Jones, for one, is not going to just sit back and allow Chappelle to get away with such cruelty.
Writing for the internet is so stressful. It used to be “I hope people read this!” And now it’s like “I hope the wrong people DON’T read this.” Anyway, stay tuned. Wrote about Chapelle.
— Saeed Jones (@theferocity) October 11, 2021
Saeed wrote about Dave Chappelle for the right people. Because the wrong people could never appreciate this kind of brilliance:
Watching Dave Chapelle’s new special, “The Closer,” I didn’t feel like I was being set free. I felt like I’d just been stabbed by someone I once admired and now he was demanding that I stop bleeding.
https://t.co/NifTKmo470— Saeed Jones (@theferocity) October 11, 2021
Let the record reflect that I wanted to title the essay “At Lease Use Lube If You’re Going to Insist On Riding Us This Hard.” My editor went with a different approach. https://t.co/NifTKmo470
— Saeed Jones (@theferocity) October 11, 2021
His editor went with “Dave Chappelle’s Betrayal”:
Betrayal pic.twitter.com/lZA5Mrv06d
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 11, 2021
It’s not as colorful as Saeed’s preferred title, but at least it’s still stupid.
By the time Chappelle declares that “gender is a fact” and that he’s “Team TERF” in solidarity with JK Rowling, I turned my television off because I wasn’t having fun anymore. And part of freedom as I experience it is that I don’t owe Dave Chappelle any of my time.
But Dave Chappelle not only owes Saeed Jones his time, but an apology on top of that.
Maybe you watch comedy specials to endure them, but I watch them to have a good time, and I stop watching them when that’s no longer the case. Chappelle argues this makes me “too sensitive, too brittle;” I just think I have better things to do than watch a standup set that could just as well have been a Fox News special. As a gay Black man, even when I’m watching a comedy special, my identity is inconveniently present. It’s so annoying; I asked my queerness to chill in the other room so I could watch “The Closer” in peace, but no such luck.
It’s clear that whatever the hell was going on in 2005, Chappelle intuited that Hollywood was trying to kill him, literally or metaphorically, and I’m Black enough to know exactly what that feels like. I cheered when he decided to save himself instead. I cheered even louder when, having saved himself, he decided to return to the stage. America might love a second-act; I love Black people who get free.
Watching Chappelle contort himself to justify ashy ideas about gender, queerness and identity is harrowing, because the only thing more brutal than someone saying hurtful shit is someone saying hurtful shit moments after making you laugh, moments after cracking you up in a way that’s both fun and deeply needed, moments after you making you feel like you all got free together. America has only gotten better at trying to kill me. Laughter is no joke, which makes the betrayal, years in the making at this point, all the more devastating. I feel like a fool to have rooted for Dave Chappelle for so long. Things were easier when the men who wanted to hurt me just said so at the jump.
Never mind that Dave Chappelle didn’t actually hurt Saeed. Never mind that Chappelle, in his humor, is also mourning the death of his friend, trans comedienne Daphne Dorman, who committed suicide after being bullied by SJWs for sticking up for Chappelle. Weird that Saeed doesn’t bring that up. We can only assume he shut “The Closer” off before that came up. It’s not like SJWs to understand what they’re actually railing against, after all.
I loved him when he made fun of people I hate. But not now! https://t.co/xtRmMDDxEV
— Il Professore di Amore e Giustizia (@RideReturn) October 11, 2021
Now it’s a betrayal.
This 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
Something will implode or we are going to be extinct. This generation is a disaster and quite embarrassing, to be honest.
Betrayal, a comedian betrayed them. Wtf?! 🤣 https://t.co/OQwe1vUODx
— Adal Suarez (@gochosuarez) October 11, 2021
If you are feeling "betrayed" by a stand up comedian, perhaps your personal priorities are not in order.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 11, 2021
Perhaps.
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