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In Defense of Dave Chappelle
Chappelle’s new special, Sticks and Stones, takes aim at the power of outrage mobs
By the time I got a chance to watch Sticks and Stones, the new Dave Chappelle Netflix special that premiered August 26, I had already read thousands of words of commentary about it. This isn’t the ideal way to consume any cultural product, let alone comedy. That line by E.B. White and Katharine White about the futility of explaining a joke didn’t become a famous (and frequently misattributed) adage for nothing. “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” the Whites wrote in 1942, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”
Today, when we spend so much more time dissecting our arts and entertainment than we do actually taking it in, we’re not just killing the frogs but altering their ecosystem to the point where only the most primitive species can survive. That’s because we’ve traded the laugh-o-meter for something like a moral yardstick. The concept of punching up versus punching down has long been a fundamental tenet of comedy, the idea being that ridiculing those in power is a classier, and ultimately funnier, gambit than belittling those lower down on the ladder. Traditionally, the great comedians have managed to harmonize their barbs by doing a bit of both at the same time. Back in the 1960s, Lenny Bruce used the n-word to make a statement about civil rights. As recently as 2005, Sarah Silverman observed that rape was a heinous crime but rape jokes were “great.” But today’s literal minded culture can increasingly hear only one note at a time. (Case in point: Silverman, who has disavowed some of her early material, recently revealed in an interview that she had been fired from a movie after producers dug up old footage of her in blackface. Never mind that the sketch, which dated back to 2007, was meant to be a comment about the scourges of both racism and anti-Semitism.) As such, “comedy criticism” now does double duty as a sort of warning system for the humorless.
Critics who don’t engage Chappelle’s jokes on the level at which he clearly intended them are operating in bad faith. Whether or not you think he’s funny, he deserves…
