Dave Chappelle has released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, which is full of jokes about the trans community and disabled people.
“I love punching down!” he tells the audience, in a one-hour show that landed on the streaming service today (31 December).
It’s his seventh special for Netflix and comes two years after his last one, the highly controversial release The Closer.
That programme was criticised for its relentless jokes about the trans community, and Chappelle revisits the topic in his new show.
He tells jokes about trans women in prison, and about trans people “pretending” to be somebody they are not.
As usual, the algorithmic media machine is trying to drum up anger and emotion because that gets clicks and ad views. There were definitely a few transphobic jokes that I was not okay with, but to say he the special is “filled” with them is a bit much.
Also the quote “I love punching down” was clearly not sincere the way he delivered it. I didn’t like the special, but the outrage over it is overblown especially considering that putting it in the news will only get more people watching it.
It’s called cognitive capitalism. They use the cognitive capacities of the human to grow the capital.
So he is punching down and is telling Trans jokes still? It’s not a percentage issue.
Let’s not bemoan specificity. If anything, we need accurate, fine details more than ever.
All the guy said what he disagreed with the portion of the title which stated that the special was “filled” with specific jokes. That particular claim IS indeed a percentage issue.
If you are taking the point further and saying that percentages shouldn’t matter, even 1% is too much, that’s a SEPARATE claim. It doesn’t address the original claim.
They’re last sentence apologizes for the content, so let’s not waste our time pretending that’s the real disagreement. The Andy Kaufman bit is 100% transphobic but OP won’t acknowledge it that way.
Perhaps you’re just seeing what you want to see. I don’t do mind games. Words mean what their definitions are. Anything else is opinion, not fact. Cite me what words exactly you are referring to that would be objectively defined as an “apology.”
thank you!
Only 10% of his special transphobic, it’s okay guys!
“I’M TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE SARCASM, TOO! WHO SHOULD I HATE NOW, I NEED YOU TO TELL ME!”
I don’t hate Chapelle, but he clearly hates trans people.
Edit: And before you get back at me, here’s my reasoning. Trans people are already victims as they get targeted by Neonazis for years now, and made the boogeyman of their whole movement (plus woke people, but that’s a majority, not minority), and he as a minority himself with that giant audience makes several specials that preaches on all the Neonazi talking points to a crowd of millions.
He’s deliberately supporting Neonazis at worst and is an unknown tool of them at best.
You know, shit stops being funny when there’s actually victims as an outcome to this.
His old jokes didn’t make Neonazis think “He’s one of us now”.
You should call your therapist. You clearly need help.
Any counter arguments from your side or only dumb insults?
It’s amazing how many snowflake comedians start crying about being cancelled and then go on to have numerous netflix specials about it. Almost like they were never actually cancelled in the first place but they learnt that if they said they were enough times, the terminally dim people who enjoy their material will pay money to see their bully fantasies played out on stage by an old rich guy.
As seen in these very comments 😂
“Oh sure we can’t joke on trans people but you get to swing at Dave Chappelle!?”
Every Edgy Millionaire Comedian – roughly the same joke but the Columbus thing makes the edge of my mouth slightly curve upward every time
This is a good point. These jokes aren’t just bad, they’re boring. Why not just tell jokes about airline food?
“I love punching down!”
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
I love that this comes after the special where he said a trans friend defended him saying he doesn’t punch down. I guess milking someone’s suicide wasn’t as successful as he planned so he changed course.
He’s running out of content
Next special:
“What’s the deal with Ovaltine? The jar is round!”
“They should call it Round-tine.”
Probably.
Comedians doing stand up usually joke about themselves or their lives. Black comedians make jokes about being black. Lesbian comedians make jokes about being lesbian.
Usually when they start joking about other people’s race, gender or sexuality, they’ve run out of material about their own lives and started punching down to keep their career going.
Rage bait
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As someone who watched the special I think his greatest crime is just not being funny and thinking he’s brave for doubling down. He’s a boomer with a fan base and tons of money. If anything, this thread is proof that cancel culture is fake. He’s Elon musk if Elon musk used to be funny.
He’s a boomer
Don’t forget there are Xers with these views as well, because chapelle’s one of them.
You’re right, Dave was born in '73, long past the Boomer cutoff point. Boomer is just another easy target to blame this mindset on but like you say this is something that defies generational gaps. I’ve met quite a few transphobic millennials/gen z-ers and from what I’ve seen on youngpeopleyoutube, really young kids are already being poisoned by transphobic social media subcultures.
“Boomer” has basically become slang for things like conservative, old-fashioned, technologically illiterate, homophobic, racist, etc.
Depends on the context, but barely anyone I know uses the word literally anymore.
Yup. I have a millennial brother who adopts these same views. Meanwhile I have boomer hippy aunts and uncles far more liberal. I think it would be an error of judgment to just isolate it to a generation. Bad brains is a human trait.
Generational targeting is really fucking old.
they’re just sexual preferences. don’t kink shame, bro.
Yeah, he’s just another disgustingly rich paranoid angry has-been.
Well said
The funny thing is I have literally no idea who he is. I have to assume he’s some American “comedian” who, like most of his ilk, is utterly irrelevant/unheard of outside the United States.
He was a famous comedian who stopped doing his popular sketch show because he didn’t like the way white people where laughing at his race jokes who came back after about a decade and now makes money by making white people laugh the wrong way at Trans people and other disenfranchised people.
He was insightful and hilarious 2 decades ago.
Last thing of his I watched didn’t make me laugh once and just felt forced and gross
Removed by mod
Maybe if you were a bit less defensive and aggressive someone would’ve informed you that it’s actually spelled “pansy fucks” and you would be able to more successfully insult and fear those you don’t understand.
Na mate, your at your much better at it. The way you completely refuse to break character is hilarious.
well said. on all points.
Ancient comedian desperately struggles to stay relevant, only manages to capture the attention of a few boomers and nazis. news at 11.
What have you ever done except take the culture war personally?
I mean I have blocked a metric shit ton of trolls
What a hero…
Punching down is never funny. Picking on people who have been marginalized or attacked for being who they are winds up being cruel, not humorous. Maybe a skilled comedian could punch down in such a way that it’s funny, but it would be an extremely rare event.
If you want to punch and be funny, you have two options. The first is to punch up. Hit the people in power. Hit the people who have luxury. For example, a joke making fun of poor people isn’t likely to be funny. A joke making fun of wealthy people, though? That has a much better chance of being funny.
The other punch style is the self punch. This is where you make fun of yourself or your own “group.” For example, I’m Jewish. If a non-Jew makes a “Jews run the world” joke, it’ll likely come across as highly anti-semitic. If I were to make that joke, I’d stand a decent chance of getting a laugh. (Well, assuming that I had basic comedy skills.)
When the right complains that the left has ruined comedy, what they really mean is that they can’t make fun of people who are suffering without being called cruel.
For example, I’m Jewish. If a non-Jew makes a “Jews run the world” joke, it’ll likely come across as highly anti-semitic. If I were to make that joke, I’d stand a decent chance of getting a laugh
You mean to say that the Jews that run the world have access to exclusive jokes?
There’s a whole space laser corps you’re missing out on
Yes! The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are just a collection of Seinfeld jokes
חחח
If someone could please name one well-known, successful, openly right-wing comedian …
That dipshit with the puppets?
You didn’t say they had to be funny
Jay Leno, Tim Allen
The members of the Blue Color Comedy Group
They aren’t overtly right-wing, they just speak in a Southern accent and talk about white trash stuff. Isn’t Larry the Cable Guy really from New York or something? My accent sounds like I was born in an Ozark outhouse, but I’m not a right-wing asshole.
Do any of them have post 2012 Right-Wing comedy bits? Foxworthy has always kept things pretty family friendly and tame.
Punching down works when it’s setting up cultural context for a much bigger punch in the other direction. Bill Burr walks that line pretty well most of the time imo. He’ll take small jabs at some low hanging fruit and then the punchline is that he’s actually a terrible person and you should feel bad for laughing at him. Sometimes at least. Other times that whole schtick doesn’t quite land.
Did Chat-GPT write this?
Punching down is never funny
clearly you have never slapped a dwarf
on a serious note, you are wrong and your categorization is arbitrary, you are playing joke police.
for example, Ricky Gervais had an entire bit about Caitlyn Jenner, is that punching up or punching down? because Ricky is more famous and maybe even more wealthy than Jenner and also a white male and also didn’t kill anyone with his car as far as I know, so that’s punching down right? or we is it punching up because we dislike Caitlyn Jenner for her pro-republican stance?
It depends on what they’re making fun of in regards to the person. If he’s joking about her being trans, that is punching down. If he’s joking about her unchecked privileges, that is punching up. Think less about people’s identity and more about their needs and then you will get a sense of direction.
Oh boy do I have a doozy for you then
https://youtu.be/86CT53xvOFY?si=xFXd-mLgGoOYJdOW
Please tell me if thats punching up or down so I can decide if I am allowed to laugh at it
Well the fun part about art is it is open to interpretation. If you laugh because “haha trans people are sexual deviants” then that’s rather shitty. If you laugh because “haha transphobic people sound like that” then you’re probably well adjusted. And if you know the context of Ricky Gervais and don’t laugh then you are well informed.
Well for me I laugh because he points out that she killed someone and got away with it unscathed guess I am just weird at understanding the point of the joke…
StrawmanStrawperson argumentI personally don’t care for Gervais because he does shit like this and his face and voice make him unable to not be snide about it. He’s left a bad taste in my mouth for a while now.
The other punch style is the self punch. This is where you make fun of yourself or your own “group.” For example, I’m Jewish. If a non-Jew makes a “Jews run the world” joke, it’ll likely come across as highly anti-semitic. If I were to make that joke, I’d stand a decent chance of getting a laugh. (Well, assuming that I had basic comedy skills.)
This is also potentially pretty bad, though. It is a hard line to tread, to make fun of the absurdity of the claim, without, at the same time, validating the premise, for those who believe it, part of why being a comedian is so hard. You have to attract the people who would otherwise believe such a thing, and then illustrate the idiotic absurdity of the claim itself, and you know, the idiocy of the believers of it. You have to make them face it. If you just end up pulling off an exclusive “self-punch”, and especially one against “your group”, it’s very likely to just be accepted/seen as you selling yourself and your group out, in order to validate everyone’s preconceived notions, even if that wasn’t necessarily your intention. Just like that dude who made a country song a while ago about politicians in washington being shitty, but also being about people on welfare eating cookies or whatever. A conservative narrative got pushed about his song, despite how he wanted, retroactively, for that not to be the case.
When is your Netflix stand-up special going to be released?
Basically this.
He’s such a culture warrior hack now. Trans jokes? It’s getting old bro. Your material sucks.
The culture war must go on otherwise we might start blaming the right people for our problems
Stephen Fry once said that comedy is about punching up. Anyone can punch down, it takes real talent to punch up, you have to make fun of your betters, because they think they are your betters.
Beating on people who are already incredibly socially ostracized is not comedy, it’s bullying. If you think it’s comedy then you’re a bully.
ITT: People who thought it was ok and punching up when he made fun of ghetto black people early in his career but today have an objection when its trans white people being the topic of 3 jokes out of an hour special
ITT: Dave Chapelle, man who left his hit show abruptly because he was concerned about the audience he had cultivated comes back to America to live with old white people and cultivate a new audience that’s much worse.
He left because his father died, I guess he should have stayed to make grape drank jokes for you? This is his current audience, notice all the black people? I guess that’s “much worse” to you according to your own words. Your racism is showing.
Bigots come in all colours. Calling the OP a racist for calling his bigot audience worse than before is pretty low.
I hate that Netflix keeps recommending this to me. No. I don’t want this kind of shit.
You aren’t missing anything. It’s just an hour of an angry paranoid rich guy whining about problems that aren’t problems.
This and that fucking Qanon child trafficking movie on Amazon have been on my Google TV all fucking break.
There’s an election coming up. They want us to blame sex trafficking on brown central Americans, instead of the actual perps.
As a coincidence, some of those will become known soon: https://lemmy.world/post/10223332
Did Jim Caviezel get worse at acting, or is that movie terribly directed? I don’t really care if the story is exaggerated or largely false, lots of movies are, but he seemed to be over acting a lot.
Do you expect Netflix to have things to watch? That’s your first mistake
I watched both his and Gervais’ latest last night out of morbid curiosity. Both were profoundly unfunny. To be fair, Chappelle was marginally funnier than Gervais, whose act seemed like a barely-disguised checklist of right-wing talking points spouted off by a narcissistic man-baby who constantly laughs at his own “jokes” (and seemed like he had a laugh track or just poor audio editing) Chappelle, at least, elicited a few chuckles when he was willing to make himself or th, insanely wealthy (pretty lackluster running bit about the submarine implosion) the butt of the joke. His constant making “joking” about trans, gay, and bisexual people was just not funny.
I think that the root cause of their shifts is that they were always in life for themselves, looking up at the rich and powerful thinking “I want that”. So, when they were getting established, the underdog thing was useful. But, they never saw themselves as underdogs but the temporarily-embarrassed millionaires. Once the got their piece, they’re right there next to the boomers with the “fuck you, I got mine” attitude to court the favor of those that will reduce their need to give back to the society that they benefitted from. I’m pretty sure neither of them are actually discriminatory in their private lives (they both basically say as much); either they just absolutely lack scruples and are happy to play a shithead to make money and powerful friends or, their pride and ego doesn’t allow them to publicly acknowledge fault and not understanding that context and nuance matter (odd to think as they are professional wordsmiths).
Same with Chris Rock and Luis C.K. Sooooooo not funny. It’s like they got infected by some unfunny virus when they did “Talking funny” with Seinfeld. Or it’s just really hard to stay funny as you get older. Carlin was amazing all his life but who else? Maybe comedians are like boxers? They don’t have an old timers day…
Yeah that’s like all he does these days. The guy is out of material. Like the third or fourth special where that’s the main Crux of it. Washed up
I’m not sure why people are surprised.
He’s always held these opinions, he just hid them among other opinions that weren’t as noticeable because he spread the hate around, and mostof the jokes were funny.
This is the same guy that got on his show, and had a segment where a white girl sang his words for him. If you can find the clip without using a service he profits from (I can’t right now, it’s only available in little “shorts” on YouTube), the whole thing is just him saying shit he doesn’t like, that would get his ass “cancelled” if he said them. And the longest segment is about gay sex being gross. Trans issues weren’t as visible back then, but the guy has always said this type of thing.
But for some reason, he’s stopped doing it to everyone, which is what made it acceptable. He didn’t spare any group, but he also didn’t target any single group more often than others, except perhaps black people. And it’s always acceptable to joke about your own group.
Now, he’s just being a douche. The jokes aren’t at all funny unless you find it funny to just bash people with no attempt at humor. It has gone far past the kind of abrasive, but exaggerated hate he used to use, but it isn’t something new.
But for some reason, he’s stopped doing it to everyone
That’s what always happens. It turns out when you’re an asshole to “everyone”, eventually you’re just an asshole to minorities.
