Dave Chappelle did nothing wrong

The one thing that has to be remembered when watching any comedy show, be it a stand-up comedian or even a funny movie or television show, is that everything you're seeing and hearing is literally and explicitly just a joke. The jokes may shed light on some uncomfortable truths or serve as a sort of commentary on real issues, but they should never be taken completely at face value. A comic's first job is to be funny, and everything else comes second. Michael Malice has said, and this may not be original to him, but I believe he's the one I heard it from, something to the effect of it being a comedian's job to make people laugh not clap. This is what Dave Chappelle does better than anyone alive, in my opinion: Make people laugh.

Chappelle's new special on Netflix, Sticks & Stones, is in many ways a direct response to all of the critics of his previous Netflix specials. In this one, he's openly trolling those critics by taking everything they complained about before and doubling down on them. Sometimes taking something funny and turning it up to 100 makes it much less funny, see James Gunn's film, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, for example, but not in this case. Despite what the many negative reviews are saying say about this special, the Ringer refers to his special as "predictable," and Vice calls it "repetitive" and "exhausting," it's clear that Chappelle is at the top of his game, and no other comics are even close to reaching his level.

Compare the critical reception of Sticks & Stones to Hannah Gadsby's Netflix special, Nanette, where Gadsby famously "quits comedy" halfway through her special because she felt like she was exploiting the pain she's felt and other people have felt in the LGBTQ community for laughs rather than doing something to bring awareness to and try to solve these issues.

The scores of the two specials on Rotten Tomatoes are very interesting:

Critics universally loved Gadsby's special and almost universally hated Chappelle's, whereas the average viewer loved Chappelle's special but found Gadsby's to be much less enjoyable. The scores for the specials are almost perfectly reversed. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with what Gadsby does in her special, and obviously plenty of people liked it and found it inspiring, but she openly acknowledges that it's not comedy. Comedy was not her intent, her intent was to subvert comedy with the goal of pushing her agenda. Whether her agenda was good or bad is irrelevant to the point.

Chappelle, on the other hand, is a comedian. His job is to make people laugh, and he's unafraid to make fun of anyone, including himself, in order to do so. What makes him a great comedian is that he's telling jokes to make people laugh, but he's doing so in a way that challenges people's perceptions of the world. He's making people think and consider their own hypocrisy by challenging accepted orthodoxy, and being hilarious while doing it. That's why he's one of the all time great comics.

The corporate press, as Michael Malice calls them, is happy to exploit Gadsby's special to push their own political agenda, and use it to attack people like President Trump for not being reverent enough toward LGBTQ people. However, not only is Chappelle's special not useful for pushing that political agenda, he's actively attacking these ideologues for attempting to destroy the lives of other people he likes or admires and daring them to try to destroy him by telling jokes they've deemed off limits. So it's not that Chappelle is ignoring "the historic criticism against his style of comedy," as Vice so self-reverently puts it, it's that he's explicitly punching back at the ironically named Vice and other people who are trying to police comedy for their own political purposes.

It's not necessary to find Chappelle's comedy funny, or to even like that he says the things that he says, but it is unacceptable to try to destroy his, or any other comic's, life and career for the jokes that he tells. The good news is that the average person, who doesn't feel the need to analyze everything in relation to their political ideology, largely finds Sticks & Stones hilarious, and wants more content from Chappelle rather than less. The market has deemed Chappelle and his comedy to be more valuable than criticism from humorless nags.