DAVE CHAPPELLE — A True Hero Of Comedy

Tommy Cooper was one of the greatest comedians who ever lived. He had several recognisable features: one was that he could make an audience laugh literally at the drop of a hat. Another was that he never told a blue joke.

Dave Chappelle performing.

There are still a few comedians like that around; Dave Chappelle is half-way there, but unlike Cooper, no one could ever call him a family entertainer. Over the past few years, comedy with the sort of edge Chappelle produces has taken a beating from the intolerant left. They haven’t yet been able to control every aspect of our economic lives, but controlling speech is a good start. As a black man, Chappelle can use one racial epithet no white comedian dare, but cussing for the sake of it has never been funny outside of a school playground. This is where Chappelle excels; he knows when and where to drop the bombs, and when and where to play it cool.

Unsurprisingly, his new Netflix special was trashed by the critics and applauded by the public in equal measure. As of September 8, Sticks & Stones had been reviewed 379 times at the Internet Movie Database, 282 of those reviews were 10/10, not unprecedented but mightily impressive.

The hostile reaction of the critics is easy to understand. Being black may give Chappelle him a certain immunity, but in the fantasy world of intersectionality his masculity puts him lower down the food chain of oppression than the women of all races and anyone whose sexual proclivities would be unwelcome in a mosque. It is these people who are now largely in control of the Western media. Like Chappelle cares.

After the conviction of Bill Cosby, he joked about him being a serial rapist, which is understandable, because the witch-hunt initiated by Gloria Allred took in a lot of people, including a jury. In Sticks & Stones though, he shows he hasn’t been taken in by all the mud that has been thrown at Michael Jackson, including the lie-ridden pseudo-documentary Leaving Neverland that was released a decade after the entertainer’s death. And his send up of hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett is right on the money.

Like all good comedians in this day and age, Chappelle writes all his own material, and in the global village that is a Herculean task. Before the Internet if not before television, a joke could be told over and over again with the same effect. Not anymore.

Where does Chappelle go from here? Hopefully on to bigger and greater things. That’s if he doesn’t get MeToo-ed.

[The above review was published originally on Medium, September 8, 2019].