We eagerly waited a week for the launch of the Dave Chapelles ‘The Dreamer’ to come out on Netflix and boy we were not disappointed. I was sitting with a friend discussing the the show a couple of days back and here we were admiring the pure genius of the man.
Chappelle’s comedy is known for its sharp wit and willingness to tackle and bring attention to controversial subjects while expressing himself humorously. He is a gifted storyteller with an outstanding ability to weave personal anecdotes and observations into his comedy which has given him a relatable and authentic edge. He has a gift for connecting with audiences in a way that makes them feel like they are part of the conversation.
The Early Years: A Comic Prodigy Emerges
David Khari Webber Chappelle was born on August 24, 1973, in Washington, D.C. His father, William David Chappelle III, was a professor of vocal performance and the dean of students at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. His mother, Yvonne Seon (née Reed, formerly Chappelle),worked for Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and worked as a professor and university administrator at several institutions including Wright State University and Prince George’s Community College. Chappelle has a stepmother and a stepbrother.
Chappelle grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Woodlin Elementary School. His parents were politically active, and family house visitors included Pete Seeger and Johnny Hartman. Hartman predicted Chappelle would be a comedian and, around this time, Chappelle’s comic inspiration came from Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. After his parents separated, Chappelle stayed in Washington with his mother while spending summers with his father in Ohio. In high school he worked as an usher in Ford’s Theatre. He attended DC’s Eastern High School for a short time before transferring to Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where he studied theater arts, graduating in 1991. Growing up with a natural talent for making people laugh, Chapelle’s early experiences on stage paved the way for his future success. Whether it was his initial stand-up performances or his breakthrough on “Chappelle’s Show,” these formative years played a crucial role in shaping the comedic prowess that defines him today. By examining his early influences and comedic roots, we gain insight into the makings of a true comic prodigy.
Fearless Social Commentary: Chapelle’s Unique Perspective
Beyond the punchlines and laughter, Chapelle distinguishes himself as a master storyteller. Whether in his stand-up specials or the skits on “Chappelle’s Show,” he weaves narratives that captivate audiences from start to finish. On November 12, 2016, Chappelle made his hosting debut on Saturday Night Live the weekend of Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election. The show also featured A Tribe Called Quest as the musical guest. In his opening monologue, Chappelle tackled Trump and the election head on. He ended his monologue by stating, “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too. His performance on SNL received widespread acclaim from critics and audiences alike. At the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards, he received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his appearance. He donated the Emmy to his former high school while filming an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Season 10, Episode 2: “Nobody Says, ‘I Wish I Had A Camera'”).
On November 21, 2016, Netflix announced that they would be releasing three new stand-up comedy specials from Chappelle in 2017, with Chappelle being paid $20 million per special. The first two specials were released on Netflix on March 21, 2017, and hail directly from Chappelle’s personal comedy vault. “Deep in the Heart of Texas” was filmed at Austin City Limits Live in April 2015, and “The Age of Spin” was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium in March 2016. The specials marked the comedian’s first concert specials released in 12 years, and proved to be an immediate success as Netflix announced a month later that they were the most viewed comedy specials in Netflix’s history.
The third special, Equanimity, was filmed in September 2017 at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C., and then on November 20, 2017, Chappelle filmed a fourth special, The Bird Revelation, at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles. On December 22, 2017, Netflix announced the expansion of the deal to include The Bird Revelation, which was released with Equanimity on December 31.
In January 2018 at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, Chappelle received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his first two 2017 specials The Age of Spin & Deep in the Heart of Texas. In September 2018, Chappelle’s Equanimity special received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded).[84] In October 2018, Chappelle returned to the big screen as “Noodles”, Jackson Maine’s best friend and retired musician in Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, a remake of A Star Is Born. The film was a massive critical and commercial success. He was nominated along with the cast for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Cast in a Motion Picture. In 2018, Chappelle and Jon Stewart joined forces for a duo comedy tour in the United States, and across the United Kingdom. He has also collaborated with Aziz Ansari for three stand-up shows in Austin, Texas, at the Paramount Theater.
In February 2019, Chappelle was nominated for and won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for Equanimity and Bird Revelation.
In 2019, Chappelle was chosen to receive the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor presented by The Kennedy Center. President of the Kennedy Center Deborah Rutter stated “Dave is the embodiment of Mark Twain’s observation that ‘against the assault of humor, nothing can stand’… and for three decades, Dave has challenged us to see hot-button issues from his entirely original yet relatable experience.” The set of people honoring Chappelle included Jon Stewart, Bradley Cooper, Morgan Freeman, Lorne Michaels, Tiffany Haddish, Aziz Ansari, Sarah Silverman, Neal Brennan, Q-Tip, Mos Def, John Legend, Frederic Yonnet, Erykah Badu, Common, SNL cast members Kenan Thompson, Michael Che and Colin Jost, as well as Eddie Murphy. The Prize was awarded at the Kennedy Center gala on October 27, 2019. The ceremony was broadcast on PBS January 7, 2020. The Mayor of the District of Columbia, Muriel Bowser, declared the day of the award ceremony “Dave Chappelle Day” in Washington, D.C.
On August 26, 2019, Chappelle’s fifth Netflix special, Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones, was released. The special garnered controversy (receiving an average score of 5.70 from Rotten Tomatoes critics), and backlash for jokes about abuse allegations against singers Michael Jackson and R. Kelly, as well as for jokes about the LGBT community and cancel culture. The following year, Sticks & Stones won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.
Dave Chapelle Renaissance
On June 12, 2020, Netflix released 8:46, a 27-minute and 20-second video of newly recorded stand-up by Chappelle on the YouTube channel “Netflix Is a Joke“. The private event was held outdoors on June 6, 2020, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where audience members observed social distancing rules and wore masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The title was chosen in reference to the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a black man, murdering him. Chappelle touches on Floyd’s murder and subsequent protests and takes aim at Don Lemon, Laura Ingraham and Candace Owens.
Expanding on the concept of the socially distanced comedy presentation, beginning with a pair of performances in late June 2020 and officially kicking off with a Fourth of July celebration, “Chappelle and friends” hosted what became known as “Chappelle Summer Camp”, which brought live performances to a masked, socially distanced audience at Wirrig Pavilion, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. These shows featured regular performances from comedians Michelle Wolf, Mohammed Amer and Donnell Rawlings, as well as Chappelle’s tour DJ, DJ Trauma and frequent special guests including Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, Louis CK, Sarah Silverman, David Letterman, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Brian Regan, Chris Tucker, Kevin Hart, Ali Wong, Trevor Noah, Tiffany Haddish, with musical guests John Mayer, Common, and many others. After several shows in July, some issues arose from neighbors’ complaints of noise and disturbances, local zoning officials granted a special variance allowing the performances to continue through October 4, 2020. The Chappelle Summer Camp series of shows ended suddenly September 25, 2020, when Elaine Chappelle announced in a closed Facebook fan group that there had been a possible COVID-19 exposure in their inner circle, and all further performances were canceled.
It was announced that Chappelle would return to host Saturday Night Live the weekend of the 2020 United States presidential election, his second time giving a post-presidential election monologue. Due to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the vote count, the results were delayed and announced earlier that Saturday. In response to unfounded allegations that Joe Biden’s presidency had been stolen from Donald Trump, Chappelle’s offered jokes ranging from Trump’s handling of the pandemic to his resulting legacy, and the political future of the United States, in his 16-minute opening monologue:
Everyone knows how that feels. But here’s the difference between me and you: You guys hate each other for that, and I don’t hate anybody. I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through. That’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve got a find a way to live your life. You’ve got to find a way to forgive each other. You’ve got to find a way to find joy in your existence in spite of that feeling.
Critics and audiences praised the monologue describing it as “scathing”, “illuminating”, and “powerful.”
In December 2020, Chappelle’s company, Iron Table Holdings purchased a fire station near his Yellow Springs, Ohio, home, with plans to convert it into a comedy club. He also retrofitted a mechanic’s garage in the same village into a clubhouse, and dubbed it “The Shack“, for podcasting.
On October 5, 2021, Chappelle starred in his sixth Netflix special The Closer. In The Closer, Chappelle made jokes about gay and transgender people, particularly transgender women, that some considered transphobic. Simultaneously, Chappelle argued that he was not anti-transgender, bringing up his opposition to North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom laws and his friendship with the late Daphne Dorman. The special was met with some backlash, including from students of Chappelle’s alma mater Duke Ellington School. On October 20, Netflix employees organized a walkout demonstrating their support of the transgender community, and demanded that The Closer be taken off of Netflix. CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged that “storytelling has real impact in the real world” but refused to take down the special, stating that he “does not believe it falls into hate speech.” In November 2021, Saturday Night Live lampooned the controversy during its Weekend Update segment, stating, “A Washington D.C. art school is postponing renaming its theater, after alumni Dave Chappelle’s Netflix controversy. Well, of course, because God forbid, you should name a building after someone problematic in Washington D.C. In summer of 2022, Chappelle announced that he would not give his name to the Duke Ellington School theater, instead insisting it should be named the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression.
Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life, a documentary covering Chappelle’s concerts in Yellow Springs during the COVID-19 pandemic, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in June 2021, followed by a series of roadshow events in the United States and Canada and a limited theatrical release on November 19, 2021.
In the early hours of May 4, 2022, Chappelle was performing at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California, as part of the Netflix is a Joke Fest, where he was tackled onstage by a member of the audience, who was swiftly subdued by security. The attacker was later found to have been armed with a replica handgun containing a knife blade. Chappelle’s 4-night stint at the Hollywood Bowl ties him with Monty Python for the most headlined shows by a comedian at the venue.
On November 12, 2022, Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live for the third time. On February 5, 2023, he received his fourth Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for The Closer.
On December 31, 2023 Netflix released Chappelle’s latest special, The Dreamer which debuted at No. 5 on the chart 2.2 million views.
The Criticism of Dave Chapelle :
Dave Chappelle loves making people mad. Throughout his career, he’s delighted in delivering jokes that offend or tell uncomfortable truths—and his latest special for Netflix, The Closer, is no different. In it, he explores at length his strained relationship with the LGBTQ community, clarifying some off-color jokes he’s told over the years while delivering new ones unflinchingly.
The special, which arrived on Oct. 5, has resulted in plenty of backlash from the LGBTQ community and trans activists, with many on social media pressuring Netflix to remove it from their services. In response, Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos came to Chappelle’s defense, vowing to leave it up no matter how much criticism the company received. None of this has stopped viewers from hitting play: the special is currently #3 on Netflix’s Top 10 in the U.S. Here’s what’s unfolded in the last few days, and how it fits into Chappelle’s career more broadly.
Chappelle explores his own transphobia in The Closer
Over the years, Chappelle has built plenty of jokes around trans subjects, including in three of his most recent stand-up specials for Netflix. In them, he compared being trans to Rachel Dolezal pretending to be a different race, and wonders what would happen if he woke up and decided he was Chinese, or if Lebron James decided to be a woman in order to dominate the WNBA. (Donald Trump used the same argument at a rally this year.)
The Closer is even more obsessed with the subject, as he weaves in and out of the topic over its 70-minute runtime. He jokingly (and perhaps half-truthfully) calls himself “transphobic” several times, and says he learned that word when he was first called out for making anti-trans jokes in a standup set 16 years ago after leaving Chappelle’s Show.
Chappelle argues that the people who are most angry at him are the ones who only hear his soundbites as opposed to whole sets. He says the target of his jokes are not gay or trans people but white people, and insinuates the jokes are retaliatory for the way that queer white people still oppress Black people. “I have never had a problem with transgender people. If you listen to what I’m saying clearly, my problem has always been with white people,” he says. At another point, he expands upon this, saying, “Gay people are minorities until they need to be white again.”
But Chappelle does make many jokes at the expense of trans people throughout. He expresses discomfort at being “tricked” into calling a trans woman beautiful, likens trans women to white people wearing blackface and compares the genitalia of trans women to plant-based meat. He also aligns himself with J.K. Rowling and calls himself “Team TERF,” stating, “gender is a fact.”
Chappelle then ends the special by telling a story about Daphne Dorman, a trans comic who he befriended in San Francisco. Chappelle says that Dorman opened for him one night at a comedy club, and that the pair then engaged in a frank discussion onstage about trans identity. Chappelle says that when he told Dorman he still didn’t understand her, Dorman responded: “I don’t need you to understand me. I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience.” Chappelle says he responded: “I believe you, because it takes one to know one.” Dorman posted complimentary things about Chappelle and their burgeoning friendship around that time. She died by suicide the following month.
At the end of the set, Chappelle pledged to stop performing material about the LGBTQ community. “I’m done talking about it. All I ask of your community, with all humility: Will you please stop punching down on my people?”
Many trans rights advocates have criticized Chappelle
In the days after the special was released on Netflix, many flocked to social media to issue criticism and demands for Netflix to take down the special. In a statement, GLAAD said, “Netflix has a policy that content ‘designed to incite hate or violence’ is not allowed on the platform, but we all know that anti-LGBTQ content does exactly that.”
Trans activists pointed toward Chappelle’s erasure of Black trans people—in his framing of the debate as being between Black rights versus trans rights—and argued that Chappelle misstated the extent of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia. David Johns, the National Black Justice Coalition’s executive director, called for Netflix to remove the special, writing to Deadline, “With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States—the majority of whom are Black transgender people—Netflix should know better. Perpetuating transphobia perpetuates violence.”
In the Guardian, the comic Dahlia Belle accused Chappelle of using Dorman as a rhetorical shield without actually caring for her. She wrote that Chappelle essentially made Dorman out to be “the Good Tranny,” in the way that white people held up Jackie Robinson and other Black people they deemed to be respectable as “good Negroes.”
“Every transgender person I know has lost someone by suicide, and rarely has the reason ever been what other trans people have said to them on Twitter. Hell. You said it yourself, Dave: ‘Twitter isn’t real.’ The marginalization, mockery, dehumanization, and violence many of us face everyday of most of our lives is what fuels our despair,” Belle wrote. “For you to use Daphne’s tragedy as your closing tag is the only thing you’ve done that’s made me angry enough to write a letter.”
On the other hand, Dorman’s own family came to Chappelle’s defense, with her sister Brandy telling the Daily Beast that Dave “loved my sister and is an LGBTQ ally.”
“What he’s saying to the LGBTQ family is, ‘I see you. Do you see me? I’m mourning my friend in the best way I know how. Can you see me? Can you allow me that?,’” Brandy Dorman wrote on Facebook. “This was a call to come together, that two oppressed factions of our nation put down their keyboards and make peace. How sad that this message was lost in translation.”
The special has created a firestorm at Netflix
While many people focused the brunt of their ire upon Chappelle, many others went after Netflix for giving him a platform. Last week, Jaclyn Moore, an executive producer for the Netflix series Dear White People who is also trans, said she would boycott working with the company “as long as they continue to put out and profit from blatantly and dangerously transphobic content.”
Terra Field, a trans Netflix engineer, wrote on Twitter that Chappelle’s special “attacks the trans community, and the very validity of transness.” When she and two other employees attended a virtual meeting for top executives that they were not invited to, they were subsequently suspended, according to the New York Times.
A Netflix spokesperson refuted the idea that Field had been suspended for voicing her opinions, writing: “It is absolutely untrue to say that we have suspended any employees for tweeting about this show. Our employees are encouraged to disagree openly, and we support their right to do so.”
Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos, meanwhile, sent a memo to employees addressing the situation and arguing that The Closer didn’t cross the line of inciting hate or violence; he vowed to leave the special up on the site no matter how loud the criticism became. “Distinguishing between commentary and harm is hard, especially with stand-up comedy which exists to push boundaries. Some people find the art of stand-up to be meanspirited, but our members enjoy it, and it’s an important part of our content offering.”
In an email on Monday, Sarandos doubled down, writing: “we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm…We have Sex Education, Orange Is the New Black, Control Z, Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix. Key to this is increasing diversity on the content team itself.” The following day, trans employees and allies at Netflix began organising a walkout scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 20. A leader of the company’s trans employee resource group wrote to its members, according to The Verge: “Netflix has continually failed to show deep care in our mission to Entertain the World by repeatedly releasing content that harms the Trans community and continually failing to create content that represents and uplifts Trans content.”
Gadsby, the Australian comic who was catapulted to international fame thanks to her 2018 Netflix special Nanette, also responded to Sarandos angrily. “I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess,” she wrote on Instagram. “You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted. F*ck you and your amoral algorithm cult.”
Cultural Impact: Chapelle’s Influence on Comedy and Society Today
Chapelle’s influence extends far beyond his individual success; it has left an indelible mark on the broader landscape of comedy. This section will explore the ways in which Chapelle has shaped the next generation of comedians and contributed to the evolution of comedic styles. From his groundbreaking sketches to his thought-provoking stand-up, Chapelle’s impact resonates through the industry, inspiring a new wave of comedic talent.
In conclusion, Dave Chapelle’s cultural impact is a multifaceted legacy that spans comedy clubs, television screens, and societal conversations. From his pioneering comedic approach to the enduring influence of “Chappelle’s Show,” his fearless social commentary, mentorship to emerging comedians, and societal contributions, Chapelle’s mark on our cultural landscape is indelible. As we navigate the comedic and societal landscapes he has helped shape, it becomes clear that Chapelle’s influence is not just a moment in time but an enduring legacy that will continue to resonate for years to come.
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We know not everyone is a fan of Dave Chapelle but we cannot ignore the genius of the man and his take on comedy and society. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below! Is Dave Chapelle the GOAT?