Chappelle has always been one to stir up controversy and this standup was no different. When I heard that he was going after the Trans community again and that people weren’t pleased, I knew I wanted to check this one out to formulate my own opinion.
I came away feeling like Chappelle is a smart guy, I like how he always loops in a couple of history lessons in his standup. I thought that the jokes toward the beginning of the show were pretty funny. The controversial parts were more toward the second half. Someone not really listening might think Chappelle expressed his support for the feminist movement and the LGBTQ+ community with his anecdotes about his one Trans friend, Daphne Dorman, and promising not to tell any more homophobic jokes. However, for those who understand coded language, we see right thought this. What he was really doing was a good ol’ fashion okey-doke, making you think he’s an ally, when in reality, he devoted the entire second half of his show toward further digging himself a transphobic hole. He even had the nerve to say that the LGBTQ community “punches down” on the Black community, which to me sounded a lot like fictional projection. For someone so worried about how the Trans community perceives him, he sure spent a lot of time obsessing over their physical appearance. Even going as far as saying gender is a fact and that he is “Team TERF”, which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, an anti-trans extremist group. The complete opposite of being a feminist or an ally.
I’m a big fan of Chappelle but if he really wanted to quite all of the people who call him transphobic, he wouldn’t have tried to gaslight us by doing some huge monologue at the end of his show, after he had already spent a good 30 minutes prior doing the exact opposite of what he was promising to no longer do. What he should have done was just cut out that entire second half from his set.
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