With his latest Netflix special, The Dreamer, Dave Chappelle is irking viewers once more.
According to Variety, the once-stellar comedian is still making his latest excursion into punch-down comedy, especially with trans people. In fact, Chappelle said, “I love punching down,” in the special, which debuted on December 31.
Chappelle, however, vowed to stop making quips about transgender people and began by describing his trip to the 1999 Man on the Moon cast, which featured Jim Carrey as the comedian Andy Kaufman. Chappelle added that “[t]hat’s how transgender people make me feel” and expressed his “very disappointment” during the day he spent speaking with Carrey in his capacity as Kaufman.
“If you guys came to this show tonight expecting me to make fun of those people once more, you’ve come to the wrong show,” he continued. “I no longer f— with those individuals. It wasn’t worthwhile to go through the trouble. I won’t say anything negative about them. Even three or four times now, but that’s all.
“I’m sick of bringing them up. You’re curious as to why I’m sick of bringing them up. Because they behaved in a way that made me want to laugh. Well, that’s absurd,” he continued. “I’m not in need of you. I’m about to get a whole new perspective. You guys won’t anticipate this at all. I’m not making transgender jokes any longer.”
Chappelle then declared that he would begin making jokes about the “handicapped” because “they’re not as organized as the homosexuals.” “I also enjoy punching down.”
He promised to stop talking about transgender people, but he continued to make quips that could be interpreted as unpleasant. One was that he had been attempting to make up with the transgender community by penning a play, but it is tragically titled “The Pronoun of Black Transgender Women,” and it centers on her.
“It’s a tear-jerker, I tell you. She passes away from grief at the play’s conclusion because white liberals are unable to communicate with her. It’s depressing,” he said.
Another joke involved saying that if he were to be detained and imprisoned, it would be better for him to do so in California, where they could go to a women’s prison and declare, “Chew this lady d**k I got,” in reference to the fact that they were female.
He even made jokes about how the attacker was transgender in his 2022 attack on a transgender person at the Hollywood Bowl. Chappelle continued, “I triggered them because I had done LGBTQ]sic] jokes and it turns out this fella was a ‘B,'” despite the audience’s apparent disapproval of the joke. He even made fun of the attacker’s bisexuality, saying that he “could have been raped.”
Don’t expect the streamer to suddenly turn on Chappelle after this special because Netflix has stuck by him throughout his ongoing trans punch-downs in his most recent specials. However, given how the audience booed during the recorded special, it’s possible that Chappelle is losing some of the fuel he seemed to derive from making fun of trans people. “It’s an odd hill to die on,” Jerrod Carmichael remarked of Chappelle’s quips in 2022.
