Author Ben Burgis on Dave Chappelle and the Moralism of Canceling Comedians

Comedians don't and really can't exercise political power. They might influence to a certain extent the way that people think about certain things, but nobody who's doing comedy is making decisions that directly impact people's lives. So if you're actually trying to do that, like if you're actually trying to affect real change, this doesn't make any sense. What I think it is, is it's a symptom of how extreme this kind of moralistic approach to politics can get, right? That you're this concerned with constantly testing whether somebody is a good person or a bad person or they ever said anything that might show them to really be a bad person and nothing could ever just be a bad moment, right? That it has to be like, this is the moment where you really revealed how toxic your soul was or something, rather than just like you said something stupid because sometimes people say things that are stupid. I think that that kind of moralism, when it's applied to comedy, I think that that's maybe the most extreme symptom of what I'm talking about because it's one thing even to get mad at somebody because of something they wrote in an editorial, right? That they're telling you exactly what they think should happen. If I write something for Jacobin and some people get upset about that, okay, at least it's a Jacobin article. I'm literally saying exactly what I think, right? But if you're doing a... So that last Dave Chappelle special at Netflix that people got mad about, which by the way, I hadn't even watched, but since I'd written this thing, people kept asking me what I thought and I finally watched it. I thought that the way that it was portrayed as if it were this like just festival of transphobic hatred... Proposters. ...was ridiculous. That in fact, the overall theme of the special, as far as those issues go, was about him moving towards a place of greater understanding and it's also a love letter to his friend that committed suicide for supporting him, was attacked for supporting him and then she jumped off a fucking building and committed suicide. This is like an homage to this person's life and it's a long part of it. I worked with Dave during the entire time he was piecing that together because we started doing shows in Austin, like November of 2020. I mean, it might've even been earlier than that. And we were working together while he was putting it together and he was responding to this idea that he was transphobic and he was saying like, this is so crazy. This is who I am and this is about this person who when I was accused of being transphobic, this person defended me and was dragged by people. There's been some talk of whether or not how much of that was creative license because people have tried to find what the tweets were. How many of them were DMs? We don't know. I don't think you could dismiss that. Or how many of them were people who actually knew her personally but then committed suicide. This is like trying to make... It's the highest form of comedy in a lot of ways because you're trying to take this socially sensitive issue and extract laughs from it, which is very difficult to do. But in no way was it transphobic. In no way was it hurtful or cruel or mean. Well, I mean, actually he spent a couple of minutes in the special explaining why the bathroom was in North Carolina were cruel. Yes. And at the end, when he was talking about his dead friend, one of the crucial moments comes when he's describing their back and forth when he had her open for him. Yes. Hilarious. Yeah, which is a hilarious thing, but there is this really moving part of it at the end where she tells him, I want you to recognize that I'm going through a real human experience and it really sinks in in that. The idea that watching this would make somebody more transphobic just seems absurd to me. What people did is they literally quoted individual sentences that he says in it. Like there's one point in the special where he says, I'm a turf, turf standing for trans exchange turf. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, okay, but literally within like two minutes of him saying, I'm on team turf, he says, I'm not saying that I don't think trans women are women. It's like, well, hold on. Right? Exactly. And I think that's the truth of those literally, right? Those two don't go together. But of course that's not how comedy works. That's like thinking that like somebody who writes a novel, that like every sentence of the novel is like what they actually personally think is true. But I think, and I've got to think that a lot of people who write articles like this must understand that on some level, right? That like this is not how comedy works, but I think that sometimes it's like bad faith. They're just being dishonest. I definitely some of that. But like also I think that like sometimes if you get this invested in like making these like moral indictments of people over these culture war battles, then you're just not even pausing to think about that. Like you're just like trying to find evidence. Like you're just like sifting through it to like find like, it's like, you know, Freddie DeBore the commentator? No. Okay. Freddie DeBore is a writer. He wrote a really good book about the education system called Cult of Smart. And he has this essay from a few years ago called Planet of Cops, where he says that it seems to him that like increasingly everybody in the culture is a cop now, right? What he means by that. And you know, he develops the metaphor. He says things like, you know, oh, there's the new movie that people are getting excited about. Give me, you know, give me two hours and 500 words and I'll find you your indictments. Right. You know, that it's like that sort of constantly sifting through things like find evidence that people have committed some kind of sin or infraction. And I think that like that's how people are approaching that. Like when they wrote these articles, you know, about, you know, how, oh my God, did you know that Dave Chappelle said that he was on Team Turf, you know, in that special, like, look, there's a mission, right? You know, you got to get those indictments, right? So you just have to sort through all of it until you can find something that, you know, that looks like a smoking gun of evidence. And I think that it's like it's a, obviously it's a terrible way to write about anything. But I think what's interesting to me about the example of comedy is that it's sort of the most absurd possible application of doing that. Because I mean, just to be like simplistic about it for a second, right? Like if you're saying something in a standup special, like generally speaking, not every sentence, but like you're saying it because you think it's funny, right? That that's what is just a different thing from saying something because like, oh, you know, here is exactly what I think, right? You know, it's like the example that we were talking about before the podcast, which I'm not going to do because it's actually in my act now, that someone put a quote that I said Oh, yeah. What a piece of shit. I'm like, hey, you got to put the whole quote. There's like a lot more to that. And it's clearly joking. But it's that thing that they do is also because someone is getting a disproportionate and exorbitant amount of attention. And when someone is like a Dave Chappelle or myself who's got a disproportionate amount of attention, there's so many people that want to look at that and go, flaws, holes, peppercake, throw rocks. Like and it's a normal thing to have this sort of reaction to someone who you feel either their take on things isn't valid or it's not this it doesn't align with your own or there's a reason why you're more morally superior to them because your position is better. You know, yeah, no, I think there I think there's a lot of that, you know, and it's also I mean, it kind of goes back to we're saying earlier about the the, you know, BLM protests in the aftermath and all that stuff. Like if you get somebody like if I mean, obviously in a case as high profile as like Dave Chappelle, like Netflix isn't going to dump him because like, why would they do that? Like that would just be putting like a lot of money on the well, not only that, but there's no reason to write. Here's the thing. It's like if Dave Chappelle was saying all trans people would die should die and they're not human. Okay, yeah, get rid of them. Right. Everybody would agree to that. You shouldn't put that on your network. But you cannot look at any of the things that he said and rationalize any of these accusations that people have towards him. He is not that guy. He is a lovely guy. If you meet him, he's one of the kindest, nicest, sweetest guys. And that's who he really is. And it's really striking too, because if you remember when all this was going on, there was like a week of the news that was all about how there's going to be this huge walkout of trans employees at Netflix. Remember this? Yeah, they took like a lunch break. There was like five of them. Yeah, there were like five people and it's not even clear that they all worked at Netflix. No, most of them didn't. And then the one of them that was there, they found a whole bunch of racist shit that she had put on Twitter. And they're like, hey, and then not even jokes, just like racist stuff. It's like, God damn it. I get what's going on. These are like, they're humans. These are flawed. And just because they said a thing that was incorrect doesn't mean that whatever position they have, they can't have a good perspective on something. Yeah. And what kills me about that example is at that very moment that that was going on, right, that there was this like super hyped up walkout that got all this attention. There was like two people on their lunch break or whatever. Like at the same time, there was the John Deere strike going on. And that was thousands of people were out on strike to get better wages and working conditions. John Deere, the tractors? Yeah. Yep. Yep. The workers. I hadn't heard of that. Yeah. Yeah. If you go back... I believe you. But I mean, I've never heard a peep out of that. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, right? So like you compare the scale of the two things and then you compare the scale of the coverage. Right. One of them is jokes. Yeah. And then you're from the greatest living comedian. That's part of the problem. It's like you... And also a guy who you sort of associate with left wing values and progressive values and you want him to fall in line. And I think that's part of the blowback is that they want to shame him into falling in line with their ideals. And one of the things that he said, like when we talked about the special and this is... We did a show together and he did this speech at an arena. And he's like, I am not going to comply with the way you want me to think and want me to behave. That's not what I'm doing. Yeah. And again, what's his response going to be realistically? Like he's just going to... Keep talking shit. That's what he's going to do. Right. I mean, it's going to be funnier and funnier. Right. The idea that saying he's a terrible person, he's a transphobe is going to get him to see things more from your perspective. In fact, he talks about this in the special. He has the thing about the woman who followed him out to the parking lot or whatever to give him a hard time. And the point is that all of that, his reaction was just, fuck you. Of course it is. Right. And then actually meeting this trans woman and having the interactions that they had and having that mean something to him. That did weigh more probably to get him to see things the way that people were yelling at him, wanted him to see them, than people just saying that... Because if you say... If somebody wants to shut you down or silence you or berate you until you stop thinking what you think, then maybe if somebody is powerless enough, they'll just shut up because they don't want to deal with it. But otherwise, one thing it's not going to do is to get them to say, okay, now I see you're right. Right. Especially if you're distorting their perception. They might say the words if they think they have to, but they're not going to think it.