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[post_date] => 2021-11-04 11:58:57
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[post_content] => Chappelle knew that claiming he had been 'canceled' would be the equivalent of dangling red meat in front of the Joe Rogan set.
Last week, Dave Chappelle posted a video to Instagram in which he addressed “the transgender community.” Many of its members, as well as members of several other communities, were upset by “The Closer,” Chappelle’s new Netflix special; and it’s not hard to understand why. In his one-hour monologue, Chappelle compares the genitalia of trans women to plant-derived meat. He proclaims that, like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, he’s “Team TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). He states that “gender is a fact.” He calls women “bitches,” drops the n-word with abandon and pitches a movie called “Space Jews” about powerful aliens who try to conquer the earth. Those are not even the most offensive parts of his act.
The show was met with a yawn from critics. In his review for The New York Times, Jason Zinoman wrote that the “fallout from ‘The Closer’ is in some ways the most interesting thing about the special.” The fallout to which he was referring included a walkout by Netflix employees, one of whom was fired for allegedly leaking internal documents to the press. It also resulted in an online feud between Chappelle and an unlikely adversary: Australian lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby.
How this situation came about has less to do with Gadsby or Chappelle and more to do with Netflix’s increasingly untenable objective to balance its reputation for unfettered creative freedom with building an inclusive workplace. In response to the widespread criticism coming from within his company, Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos wrote a long, defensive memo to employees in which he stressed that the streaming platform is committed to airing diverse perspectives: “We are working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story. So we have Sex Education, Orange is the New Black, Control Z, Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix.” So there was Gadsby, trotted out as a token for all Netflix employees to see.
Chappelle responded by offering trans people—all of them, everywhere—the opportunity to meet with him and air their grievances, but only under certain conditions, which he laid out in a video clip that is posted to his Instagram account. They couldn’t come unless they had watched “The Closer” in its entirety. Chappelle would determine where and when this meeting would take place. And finally, he said, all prospective attendees “must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.”
You could almost hear Chappelle’s 2.4 million Instagram followers nervously laughing while asking themselves: Who?
Hannah Gadsby, an Australian from a conservative small town in Tasmania, rose to international prominence in 2018 with “Nanette,” a Netflix special that contained atypical standup fare: In it, she described being badly beaten by a homophobic man. She spoke about suffering from mental illness and revealed that because standup comedy demanded constant self-deprecation it was killing her soul. She does an extended set on art history to take down its role in amplifying and perpetuating misogyny—or, as she puts it, “to needle the patriarchy.”
Gadsby’s audience has virtually no overlap with Chappelle’s. He is a straight, Black, American man with a storied reputation for scalding political satire that focuses primarily on race and racism. And yet, his name and Gadsby's are now linked in an angry controversy.
Once Sarandos’s email was leaked to the press, Gadsby was irate, not so much at Chappelle but at Netflix. She took the unusual step of firing back at her distribution partner, describing the company as an “amoral algorithm cult” in a public letter she posted on Instagram. “Hey Ted Sarandos!” she began, “Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chappelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view.”
That could have been the end of Gadsby’s involvement in this narrative. But Chappelle is a guy who never will miss an opportunity to capitalize on controversy. He knew better than anyone that invoking Gadsby in his response would both signal solidarity with Sarandos—"He’s the only one who didn’t cancel me yet,” he said his Instagram video—with the added benefit of dangling more red meat in front of the alpha-male Joe Rogan set. And once again, he was right: Shortly after the video was posted, Gadsby and Chappelle appeared in dozens of headlines together, including a New York Times obituary for another, unrelated, comedian. Right-wing troll Ben Shapiro tweeted, “Admitting that Hannah Gadsby is unfunny shouldn't just be a precondition for meeting with Dave Chappelle. It should be a precondition for being considered a sentient human.” Chappelle supporters posted attacks to Gadsby’s Instagram account, flooding the comments with insults from Chappelle supporters, just as she predicted.
I decided to watch “The Closer” last week in its entirety, followed by “Nanette.” Neither special could be considered a laugh riot. Many of the jokes in “The Closer” reflect Chappelle’s frustration and bewilderment at society’s having evolved to accommodate diversity in gender and sexuality faster than it has ever risen to deal with racism. It’s an interesting point, but also problematic because the construction of Chappelle’s us-versus-them jokes rest on the fallacy that the Black and LGBTQ communities are mutually exclusive. In reality, as Netflix employee Terra Field pointed out in in a viral Twitter thread, Black trans people are the ones who bear the brunt of the real-world consequences of Chappelle’s jokes: 27 of the 43 trans people who are known to have been murdered in 2021 were Black, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
What I found most fascinating about watching these two specials back-to-back was that both Gadsby and Chappelle tell almost the exact same “joke”—I use this term loosely—about anti-trans violence, though from opposite points of view. In “Nanette,” Gadsby describes taking a beating from a straight man who thought she was hitting on his girlfriend. This story was intentionally unfunny. In “The Closer,” Chappelle brags about beating up a butch lesbian after she took a swing at him because she thought that Chappelle was hitting on her girlfriend. This story was unintentionally unfunny.
While watching “The Closer,” I got the sense that not only did Chappelle anticipate the firestorm over its content, but, lacking any relevant new material, he structured the special—ending with a tragic story of a trans comedian friend who died by suicide—precisely so he would be able to cast himself as a victim of “cancel culture” after it was released. “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it!” he said at a sold-out show at LA’s Hollywood Bowl on October 7, as he received a standing ovation.
In the special, Chappelle once again comes to the defense of people like Kevin Hart, one of the highest grossing movie stars of all time, because he lost his job hosting the Oscars four years ago due to the latter’s homophobic tweets. He defends the Grammy-nominated rapper DaBaby, who made jokes about AIDS at a music festival last summer and was subsequently dropped from Lollapalooza. Now Chappelle believes himself to be among the Canceled because, in the wake of the Netflix-Gadsby furor, he was disinvited to film festivals. Film festivals! Has there ever been a more bougie complaint? The man is a multi-millionaire, widely acknowledged even by his critics as a brilliant comedian, who fills stadiums all over the country.
Dave Chappelle has not been canceled. Awash in fame and money, he has simply lost his edge. In “The Closer,” Chappelle states that this is going to be his last comedy special for a very long time. For this, everyone—including Ted Sarandos—can be grateful.
[post_title] => 'If this is what being canceled is like, I love it!': Dave Chappelle plays the culture war game
[post_excerpt] => The comedian deliberately manufactured a controversy by gratuitously name-checking Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who has no overlap with his fan base, in order to amplify his latest Netflix special.
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[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12
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Nancy Mitford[/caption]
Linda abandons her first husband: that is Diana, who left her own husband to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain’s tiny smudge of fascists. She falls in love with a communist: Jessica. Then a Frenchman: Nancy. She is superficially kind: Deborah.
Linda is that mercurial thing: charming. Charm is the ability to seduce people against their better instincts. She is a feather in the wind. Such people do not take responsibility. They do not have to. The Pursuit of Love is essentially redemptive: for the Mitfords and for the aristocracy. It is the founding document of the Mitford cult—without it, there would be no cult—and it is self-serving. They only pursued love, after all—who doesn’t? In response, I can only purse my lips and say: Nazis?
The truth of their fascism—Diana was Mosley’s lover and helpmeet and Unity stalked and worshipped Hitler—is more repulsive than mere viewers of The Pursuit of Love can know. There is, for instance, no scene in the novel or TV adaptation in which Unity, living in Germany, boasts that her home is a flat belonging to Jews. Which Jews, and where are they now? (It would have made a better novel than Linda shtupping a boring Communist, but Nancy was writing absolution, and the family appreciated it. On reading it, Lord Redesdale wept with happiness.)
There are many examples. “Everyone should know I am a Jew hater,” wrote Unity to the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, in case mere speech was not loud enough. As late as the 1980s, Diana was blaming global Jewry for the Holocaust. If they had stepped in and saved German Jews from the consequences of their own evil—by resettling them, she suggests—it might not have happened. Consider the 1938 Evian Conference, at which the assembled representatives of 32 countries expressed their regrets at being unable to provide refuge for the Jews of Germany and Austria. Apparently she missed it.
There is a tendency to present the Mitfords as Nancy did: as eccentric and therefore unthreatening aristocrats whose attachment to murderous tyranny in life was no more significant than their clothing, their manners, or their speech. They were young and they succumbed to the jackboot: that is, the line. (Unlucky, that’s all. Poor Lady Redesdale.) It is convenient—it defends the wider aristocracy from accusations of racism, of hating democracy—and it is unjust. That Unity failed to kill herself when war broke out—she lived for nine years with a bullet in her skull—does not forgive the bullets she wished on others, if they were Jews. She was once found in the garden of a friend, practising shooting for the day she could legally kill Jews. (She was a terrible shot. When she shot herself, she missed.) In England, she is only remembered as a bit odd.
[caption id="attachment_2771" align="aligncenter" width="677"]
The Mitford Family in 1928.[/caption]
I think that, in retrospect, their vernacular absolved them. It makes them sound unserious; gossip columnists near tyrants, and amateurs at that. For this I blame Noël Coward and Enid Blyton. We are so used to hearing the cadence and idioms of English as it was spoken in the light comedies and children’s stories of the 1930s, that it is easy to laugh at Diana’s defence of 
Diana Mitford, later Lady Mosley.[/caption]
Diana does not write about her physical passion for Oswald Mosley, but it is made obvious by what she gave up for it. She left a rich, loving husband—Bryan Guinness— to be Mosley’s mistress, only marrying him after his wife died (of peritonitis or heartbreak, depending on who is telling). Diana not only ruined her reputation for Oswald; she was also interned for three years as a fascist sympathizer during the Second World War. She could never admit to need (six siblings and stubbornness prohibit it) and was never short of words—she posed quite successfully as a pseudo-intellectual, mostly on the basis of possessing books—but on her passion for Mosley she only said: “He was completely sure of himself and of his ideas.” Conviction was not something her father, Lord Redesdale, who raged and squandered his fortune, ever had.
Redesdale was self-hating. His older brother Clement was killed in the First World War, and he was the remnants: a disappointing younger brother in competition with a ghost. In response he destroyed the great fortune that shamed him, which is now a few cottages, a pub, and a snack bar. (He was also likely a manic depressive. But if aristocrats had family therapy the history of Great Britain would be a different tale.) So that was that: Diana settled into Mosley’s iron fist like a pretty bird. She called him “The Leader"; by the end she was almost the only follower. Having read almost everything about Diana, I wonder if her fascism was both convenient and retrospective. Because the best and worst thing I can say about Diana Mosley is that she isn’t a convincing fascist. She was trivial and flinty; she was skin deep. She said in old age, “I don’t mind in the least what people’s politics are.”
Her family say she never changed her views: Were these, then, her views? I believe it because she was no intellectual—we are back to Hitler’s dietary imperatives and beautiful hands—and, after she was imprisoned with Mosley during the war for national security, how could she perform a retreat, admit a wrong? Diana destroyed herself for lust, and so trapped herself. It is a fair fate for someone so visual.
Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who was conceived in a small town in northern Ontario called Swastika—which still exists—is more horrifying. She went to Munich in 1932 to stalk Hitler. She hung round at Nazi party offices and lurked in his favourite restaurant—the Osteria Bavaria—with the confidence of the British aristocrat with golden hair. He considered her a lucky charm—she was related to Winston Churchill by marriage—but it consumed her. You know how stupid some people sound on Twitter? Unity wrote like that on paper. “It was all so thrilling,” she writes of one encounter with Adolf, “I can still hardly believe it. When he went, he gave me a special salute all to myself.” She would stand on street corners to “waggle a flag” at him.
It was not abnormal for women to react to him like that. One 
Unity Mitford in 1938, wearing a swastika pin.[/caption]
One 
