Dave Chappelle - "Killin' 'Em Softly"

fuck you

i mean, horray for being right, asshole.

maybe you guys are right and this comedian should have rewritten all his jokes so that nobody was made fun of

maybe he also should have rewritten them so that they were jokes

and did not seem embittered by the existence of other people

for real, dave chappelle used to strike me as a really kind dude. it's a shame.

also i miss his old voice

i always thought of him as a kind dude! it weirds me out that he's more into KIR

KIR about his kind of mean, obvious iconoclasms. oh you're a cis man who is made uncomfortable by transgender women because you might be attracted to one? how novel.

i also remember with fondness his bit about feeling bad for monica lewinsky because "that's a hard thing to be famous for." he used to seem more empathetic.

these were both p bad. bummer.

his empathy was always one of the things i liked most about him

xp

come on gay cpr is a gag you could see on Modern Family

fuck that show too while we're here

like there were some glimpses of the old Dave there and some legitmately funny bits but too many of these jokes were like some Rob Schneider shit

some people act like we are living in the year 2050

This is just such a weird thing to say - like if you agree we're going to be less assholish in the future, why not start now?

maybe you guys are right and this comedian should have rewritten all his jokes so that nobody was made fun of

Who and how you make fun of people is kind of central to the concept of comedy - punching down is rarely funny (and thus why conservative comedians are terrible or nonexistent).

tough crowd in here...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/webassets.ticketmob.com/LS/images/comedians/Rodney-Dangerfield.jpg

i have to say it again: that long-ass story about eating the sandwiches and his kid at school was really lame. and so very long. the weird thing about it was that it wasn't believable at all.

bill burr wastes the last half of his new special telling a shaggy dog story about a gorilla and its also lame. points for committing to a bit though, i guess.

I love the sandwich story, esp the line about how a Dave Chappelle bit increases its value

*bite

some people act like we are living in the year 2050

This is just such a weird thing to say - like if you agree we're going to be less assholish in the future, why not start now?

it's not that weird. gender has been fixed for tens/hundreds of thousands of years. there is nothing assholish about accidentally calling someone the wrong pronoun. it may be ignorant, they may just simply be mistaken. it has happened to me many times during my life. i used to have long hair, and i was on a drug that ended up hormonally altering me during my formative years, growing breast tissue, giving me a sort of concave chest and various body issues. whenever i got called "Miss" i knew it was cos the person was ignorant of my condition, or just mistaken, or maybe distracted and/or had bad eyesight. there were all sorts of possible reasons, and jumping down their throat about it was only guaranteed to get everyone angry and start my heart to racing. my gender identity has been a pretty fluid, i shop in the women's section, i used to go on dates and playing shows wearing dresses, and i was heavily involved with the feminist activist community for a good decade and playing in a pan-sexual pan-gender inclusive bands. all this shit doesn't get thrown away cos i laughed at a comedian.

HERP

there is a very potent absurdity to the very idea of gender. these silly games us humans play. it is ripe ground for comedians.

And there's the DERP

dude, please. that is not what chappelle's jokes about transgender people were about.

xp

i've been watching old episodes of Friends with cyrus and i forgot about how freaked out they were by lesbians on that show. it doesn't seem that long ago! but i guess it kinda is in t.v. years. that show is so norm-core to the bone.

also, when they are playing a quiz game and the question comes up "what is joey's favorite food?" and chandler yells out "sandwiches!" i totally laughed harder than during dave's long-ass sandwich story.

there is nothing assholish about accidentally calling someone the wrong pronoun.

true, that one wasn't as bad as the one where he adopts a typical sneaky transgender voice and says "heh heh, let's go out the club and trick some guys into fucking us"

This is the sort of thing that only an established comedian can get away with in his "I'm still here" Netflix special. A young up-and-comer from a new generation would never make this joke. It'll go away.

this is probably the first time i ever saw him. and i always remembered the moving to the village and having the nightmare about the guy putting a gun to his head and the biting the penis off thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJXIuzRnyI

i've never seen that! he looks like a baby. that one seems like he's at least a little making fun of his own homosexual panic. also the fact that he looks like a baby makes the straight male obsession with gay men seem...typically juvenile.

there is nothing assholish about accidentally calling someone the wrong pronoun.

accidentally, no, of course not, and I don't think anybody is suggesting otherwise. making a statement like "well HER dick is out" and making fun of the juxtaposition of a "she" with "he" parts is. (as is suggesting it isn't "fair" to be expected to play along).

I've accidentally called the wrong pronoun before - most human beings just apologize and correct themselves at that point and .....that's it.

i have to admit the bit about getting on an airplane and asking the pilot "yo, you wanna live, motherfucker?" was hilarious tho

Nothing is sacred in comedy, it's either all in or out IMO. But whether you find the jokes funny or poor taste is up to you obvs.

no one has ever said comedians can't say what they want. but accordingly, they can fucking suck it up when they say wack things and people point it out.

^ yeah, agree with that.

making a statement like "well HER dick is out" and making fun of the juxtaposition of a "she" with "he" parts is.

but he's joking about social awkwardness at parties. isn't this a standard topic for comedians? this is normalizing trans issues in a way.

social awkwardness at parties is so not what was the subject of his joke, even if that's what *you* got from it

the joke was about navigating a changing world full of chicks with dicks and how socially awkward it is that chicks can have dicks nowadays

dave is old news now anyway. i'm already anticipating...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Fe3mInaTI

where does this no punching down thing come from? both Chapelle's standup and show was largely crackhead based.

re: crackheads, Dave typically told crackhead jokes or played crackhead characters as commentary on his own community

so he isnt allowed to joke about people outside his community?

jesus have you not read any of the previous 200 posts

look, if your argument is he should just not joke about it to avoid spreading potentially hateful ideas then he did that for like a decade! he stopped his hugely successful and influential TV show exactly for that reason. he agrees with you.

you can joke about something without turning that something into an item of mockery.

you could tell a joke involving a transgendered person that actually satirizes society's reactions to something they don't understand. you can also tell a joke involving a transgendered person that amounts to "lol this person calls herself a lady but she has a dick and they expect me to call her 'she'".

I don't think Dave is some hateful asshole that dislikes transgendered people as much as I think he got lazy and was going for low-hanging fruit with his audience. doesn't make it much better though.

as I said, I left feeling entertained that night, but that 5 minutes or so had me very uncomfortable, not laughing, and wishing for him to move on.

it also depends on the stature of your target. the transgender community is undoubtedly earning acceptance that was unthinkable even a decade ago but they're lagging behind the gay community in that many people that are "ok" with homosexuality still condemn transgenders. At the time of Dave's special, it was early 2015, so we didn't have the North Carolina bathroom bill yet, but we did have the aforementioned savage McDonald's beatdown, and National Review had just a year earlier published its infamous nasty article "Laverne Cox is not a woman".

I'm not saying comedians have to be agents of social change, I'm not even saying they can't ridicule things or joke about controversial things (I'm hardly a prude, I probably laugh at shit that would get me 50 FPs if people knew about it here)....but it's probably best if telling a joke involving a community fighting for acceptance that you don't make it a lowest-common denominator joke reinforcing the worst of stereotypes about a group that is still fighting hard to gain acceptance.

Let's do Katt Williams next.

I love like 2005-era Katt

gender has been fixed for tens/hundreds of thousands of years.

Not the right thread, but this isn't remotely true, even if you fix it to the US and its antecedents.

there is nothing assholish about accidentally calling someone the wrong pronoun.

Right, but (as I know some people have said), that's not what Dave Chappelle was doing here.

Good on you for the subject of the rest of that post - I'm not criticising you, and god knows I misgender people myself, even ones I've known a long time. Well, particularly them.

What I meant was, you could have said the year 3000 and I'd have thought oh yeah fair enough, we'll be mists inside spacesuits living on Venus, significant social change will have taken place. But we're probably both going to see 2050, it's not a far off utopia. And I agree that society (or at least the USA and its shadow) is changing on this pretty quickly, I would have thought 10 years ago that 2050 would have been a good estimate for "Trans/gender thinking gets to where we imagine it should be", and now I can see it happening. Though the kids who have taken it on now will be the old giffers then, I suppose you could say that that's when it'll be finished.