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.
Do you have a distinction for making fun of a person for who they are and making fun a vulnerable person for who they are?
Yeah, it’s the vulnerability.
That’s not a trick question. You nailed it. The difference in conclusions is the difference in premises.
Making fun of someone wealthy for being wealthy is fundamentally different from making fun of some trans for being trans, because being a queer minority is a vulnerability, and being rich as fuck super duper isn’t.
And even that is accepting “wealthy” as some essentialist property of who someone is, rather than an obscene advantage they happen to own.
So then you treat people better who you deem as vulnerabke, but it’s punching down when jokes are made about the people you treat better?