What happened to Dave Chappelle: The cruelty of “Sticks & Stones” is a sign of the times |
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What happened to Dave Chappelle: The cruelty of “Sticks & Stones” is a sign of the times
Dave Chappelle is completely attuned to the mean spirit of 2019. That's what's throwing off his old fans
Published September 5, 2019 11:00AM (EDT)
On September 17, 2001, the great David Letterman became the first late night host to return to television days after 9/11 blindsided New York City, and the world. In his monologue, Letterman eschewed attempts at humor, choosing instead to meet the confusion and mourning blanketing America with an appropriate solemn acknowledgment. This became the pause the nation needed before feeling permission to laugh again in the wake of a horrific tragedy.
Nearly 20 years later another great Dave — Dave Chappelle — has handed a different permission slip to Americans: one giving folks the green light to laugh at tragedies and, more to the point, the victims and survivors.
Maybe that’s not being fair. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people and the injuries of more than 6,000 others — a massive culture-shifting calamity by any feeling person’s definition.
In his new Netflix special “Sticks & Stones,” the objects of Chappelle’s ire are folks ostensibly making their personal tragedies everyone’s problems by using them to perpetrate career death and reputation homicide upon celebrities. These people, he tells us, have made him a “victim blamer.”
He guns for two men at the center of “Leaving Neverland,” who allege that late pop music idol Michael Jackson molested them when they were 7 and 10 years old. And cancel culture advocates who took aim at his personal friends, like Kevin Hart and another A-list comic he was good friends with “before he died in that terrible masturbation accident.”
Then there’s the easily offended “alphabet people,” his shorthand for the LGBTQ community, particularly, as he says, the “confusing” Ts. The #MeToo movement, organizers of school shooting drills — they’ve all gotten out of hand and need to be taken down a peg.
Chappelle even takes a moment to stereotypically mimic Asians, which he defuses later on by reminding the audience that his wife is Asian. The entirety of “Sticks & Stones” is structured around such logic: by signaling to those who are true believers in his genius that it’s all just a joke, only words, this earns his ability to “punch down,” as the parlance goes.
In that context, his stated position that he doesn’t believe Jackson’s accusers is about as true as his tall tale about “peppering” an opioid addict who had supposedly broken into his house with birdshot fired from his shotgun — which is to say, not true at all.
And perhaps he doesn’t really mean it when he says, even if Jackson molested children, “I mean” — long........