Stand-up comedy has always been shocking and offensive. The taboo of jokes you wouldn’t be allowed to make is half the fun, and of course, this is fine. [...] Some comedians do take it too far, though, digging in their heels deeper and deeper, becoming more and more offensive for recognition and shock-laughs. -- Declan McMahon, 9th grade
TRIGGER WARNING: Intense swearing (in quotes), Slurs (in quotes), Mentions of Transphobia, Homophobia, Misogyny, Sexual Assault, Sexual Harassment, and Anti-Semitism
Stand-up comedy has always been shocking and offensive. The taboo of jokes you wouldn’t be allowed to make is half the fun, and of course, this is fine. Jokes made at the expense of others are what make bits funny. And there have always been people who have hated comedy for just this reason. As comedian Ronny Chieng said in his most recent Netflix special, Speakeasy, “If you’re looking for flaws, you’re going to find flaws.” Comedians have always been under heavy scrutiny due to the nature of their jokes, but often the criticism of a certain routine or special is unfair, just a fishing expedition for more outrage to add on to the train of cancel culture.
Some comedians do take it too far, though, digging in their heels deeper and deeper, becoming more and more offensive for recognition and shock-laughs.
Outright bigotry and insults labeled as comedy have become a disturbing trend lately in comedy. Recently two comedians in particular, Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. have been called out for their abuse of power and bigotry.
Dave Chappelle
David Khari Webber Chappelle got famous in the comedy world with his sketch series The Chappelle Show. The Chappelle Show ran from 2003 to 2006, when it was canceled.
Dave Chappelle’s brand has always been to toe (and even cross) that funny/offensive line mentioned earlier, but his Netflix specials are where he has begun to take potshots at all minorities, (and majorities, for that matter). In his most recent (and last) Netflix special, The Closer, the first offensive joke comes within seven minutes of the introduction. It’s a long setup joke about his experience with COVID-19. When he had COVID, he explains, he was holed up in his house watching videos of Asian hate crimes on his phone and thinking, “When I saw these Black people beating those Asians up, I realized that was probably what was happening in my body.” This got some uneasy laughs from the audience and he continued. While I can’t get into all the offensive jokes in the standup as I want to focus on a particular bit some of the worst jokes in the routine include: A long-winded joke about Jewish people taking land that isn’t theirs (including the use of the word “Jews”), a joke about the AIDS crisis in the LGBTQ+ community, a joke about wanting to rape women, but not wanting to rape “frumpy lesbians,” (substitute the word lesbian with a slur), and said of women trying to cancel him “Man f*ck y'all too, y'all canceled. I'm never [masturbating] to your pictures again.”
Dave Chappelle has been straying further from comedy and into criticism for a while now, and this special is a prime example. Comedy journalist Jason Zinoman puts it best in a recent New York Times article “Chappelle acts less like a comic and more like a pundit. He’s far more comfortable than most of his peers in going long stretches without jokes. His recent monologues [...] were both righteous and largely without humor.”
Arguably the worst part of this special, however, was the nearly twenty-four-minute transphobic rant, interspersed with him ironically assuring the audience that he wasn’t transphobic. See here. (Please note this video contains transphobia). He begins the segment by “getting to the core of the ‘crisis,’” asking “what is a woman?” He then goes on to say “These transgenders, these [people] want me dead,” referring to transgender people as ‘transgenders,’ an outdated and incorrect term for describing them.
Katy Steinmetz of TIME Magazine puts it best: “Referring to someone as “a transgender” can sound about as odd as saying, “Look, a gay!” It turns a descriptive adjective into a defining noun and can make the subject sound distant and foreign like they’re something else first and a person second.”
Not only does he refer to them incorrectly though, but he also calls himself “Dave Chappelle, transphobic comedian.” Additionally, he outright insults them quite a few times, “[TERFs] don’t hate transgenders, they just look at transgender women like we blacks might look at someone doing blackface. It offends them, like ‘Oh this b*tch is doing an impression of me,” and then says he agrees with TERFs, essentially saying that a transgender woman is like a white person doing blackface.
This blatantly bigoted humor may be a response to people calling him transphobic for jokes he made in his last special. “[Chappelle] sees pushing these hot buttons as the easiest way to make a big fuss,” notes Zinoman. Instead of apologizing for those jokes, he does what he has always done best. He doubles down on the transphobia.
He blatantly deadnames (and misgenders) Caitlin Jenner saying “why is it easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it is for Cassius Clay to change his name?” He also insults veterans, “Oh my god this guy is peeing out of his butt for some reason,” he says of a man with female genitals, “Oh my god he must be a veteran, thank you for your service.”
And guess what? The audience laughs. They find this hilarious. His humor has long since crossed the line between humorous and offensive, and is now in the deep end of comedy with a selective audience. And luckily, that’s just the audience that wants to see him. The audience laughs, making it appear like these are funny jokes, jokes with which people agree, when they don’t.
Louis C.K.
Louis C.K. was born Louis Székely in 1964 in Washington, D.C. He got into writing late-night television after noticing that his mother had “only bad television” to watch when she got home from work.
His controversies started to come to light in 2017, right as the #MeToo movement was taking off. It began when the release of his film I Love You Daddy, was canceled mere hours before the premiere. The plot centered around a TV writer (played by C.K.) who’s daughter started a relationship with a man 50 years older than her. Already a morally gray plot that was a thinly veiled Woody Allen homage, it took on a new light with the 2017 report of five women accusing him of sexual assault.
Spanning from the late 1990s to 2005, five women detailed accounts of C.K. stripping naked and masturbating in front of them without their consent and while they were clearly uncomfortable.
When first confronted about these rumors in an interview by Vulture in 2016, he said “I don’t care about that, that’s nothing to me. That’s not real. [...] If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head. I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after.”
His stance changed drastically after the New York Times dropped a report on him that included quotes by multiple witnesses and victims. He released a statement that began with the words “These stories are true.”
He then continues, “What I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your d*** isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.” This sort of blame-shifting and saying that he ‘didn’t learn until too late’ not to expose himself to women who didn’t ask for it is a clear excuse. It’s a way to put the fault onto his supposed naiveté (although he was in his late 20s and early 30s at the time).
Perhaps the most ironic part about these accounts of his disgusting behavior is that he often makes jokes about masturbation and other uncomfortable topics. That was, until these reports dropped, his unique brand of comedy. Now, people are wondering whether his jokes about pedophilia, necrophilia, and racist jokes reflect his beliefs and actions as well.
In his most recent special, Sorry, he jumps into more masturbation jokes and addresses the situation: “I like jerking off, I don’t like being alone, that’s all I can tell you. I get lonely, it’s just sad. I like company. I like to share. I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark. You’d gather folks and amaze them.”
Then, in perhaps the most insensitive, racist, misogynistic, and disgusting joke of all time, he compares the women he masturbated in front of to enslaved people: ”So to assume that she likes it is like if they heard [enslaved people] singing in the field and you’re like, ‘Hey, they’re having a good time out there.'” C.K. immediately jumps into his controversies and yet doesn’t take responsibility.
C.K. and Chappelle are prime examples again of the downtrend in comedy as older, unrelatable men attempt unsuccessfully to grasp at the dying strands of an industry they once owned. The industry still supports them and puts them on a pedestal. It’s our job as an audience to stop taking their stupidity and bigotry, and stop watching their shows.
Stand-up comedy has always been shocking and offensive. The taboo of jokes you wouldn’t be allowed to make is half the fun, and of course, this is fine. Jokes made at the expense of others are what make bits funny. And there have always been people who have hated comedy for just this reason. As comedian Ronny Chieng said in his most recent Netflix special, Speakeasy, “If you’re looking for flaws, you’re going to find flaws.” Comedians have always been under heavy scrutiny due to the nature of their jokes, but often the criticism of a certain routine or special is unfair, just a fishing expedition for more outrage to add on to the train of cancel culture.
Some comedians do take it too far, though, digging in their heels deeper and deeper, becoming more and more offensive for recognition and shock-laughs.
Outright bigotry and insults labeled as comedy have become a disturbing trend lately in comedy. Recently two comedians in particular, Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. have been called out for their abuse of power and bigotry.
Dave Chappelle
David Khari Webber Chappelle got famous in the comedy world with his sketch series The Chappelle Show. The Chappelle Show ran from 2003 to 2006, when it was canceled.
Dave Chappelle’s brand has always been to toe (and even cross) that funny/offensive line mentioned earlier, but his Netflix specials are where he has begun to take potshots at all minorities, (and majorities, for that matter). In his most recent (and last) Netflix special, The Closer, the first offensive joke comes within seven minutes of the introduction. It’s a long setup joke about his experience with COVID-19. When he had COVID, he explains, he was holed up in his house watching videos of Asian hate crimes on his phone and thinking, “When I saw these Black people beating those Asians up, I realized that was probably what was happening in my body.” This got some uneasy laughs from the audience and he continued. While I can’t get into all the offensive jokes in the standup as I want to focus on a particular bit some of the worst jokes in the routine include: A long-winded joke about Jewish people taking land that isn’t theirs (including the use of the word “Jews”), a joke about the AIDS crisis in the LGBTQ+ community, a joke about wanting to rape women, but not wanting to rape “frumpy lesbians,” (substitute the word lesbian with a slur), and said of women trying to cancel him “Man f*ck y'all too, y'all canceled. I'm never [masturbating] to your pictures again.”
Dave Chappelle has been straying further from comedy and into criticism for a while now, and this special is a prime example. Comedy journalist Jason Zinoman puts it best in a recent New York Times article “Chappelle acts less like a comic and more like a pundit. He’s far more comfortable than most of his peers in going long stretches without jokes. His recent monologues [...] were both righteous and largely without humor.”
Arguably the worst part of this special, however, was the nearly twenty-four-minute transphobic rant, interspersed with him ironically assuring the audience that he wasn’t transphobic. See here. (Please note this video contains transphobia). He begins the segment by “getting to the core of the ‘crisis,’” asking “what is a woman?” He then goes on to say “These transgenders, these [people] want me dead,” referring to transgender people as ‘transgenders,’ an outdated and incorrect term for describing them.
Katy Steinmetz of TIME Magazine puts it best: “Referring to someone as “a transgender” can sound about as odd as saying, “Look, a gay!” It turns a descriptive adjective into a defining noun and can make the subject sound distant and foreign like they’re something else first and a person second.”
Not only does he refer to them incorrectly though, but he also calls himself “Dave Chappelle, transphobic comedian.” Additionally, he outright insults them quite a few times, “[TERFs] don’t hate transgenders, they just look at transgender women like we blacks might look at someone doing blackface. It offends them, like ‘Oh this b*tch is doing an impression of me,” and then says he agrees with TERFs, essentially saying that a transgender woman is like a white person doing blackface.
This blatantly bigoted humor may be a response to people calling him transphobic for jokes he made in his last special. “[Chappelle] sees pushing these hot buttons as the easiest way to make a big fuss,” notes Zinoman. Instead of apologizing for those jokes, he does what he has always done best. He doubles down on the transphobia.
He blatantly deadnames (and misgenders) Caitlin Jenner saying “why is it easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it is for Cassius Clay to change his name?” He also insults veterans, “Oh my god this guy is peeing out of his butt for some reason,” he says of a man with female genitals, “Oh my god he must be a veteran, thank you for your service.”
And guess what? The audience laughs. They find this hilarious. His humor has long since crossed the line between humorous and offensive, and is now in the deep end of comedy with a selective audience. And luckily, that’s just the audience that wants to see him. The audience laughs, making it appear like these are funny jokes, jokes with which people agree, when they don’t.
Louis C.K.
Louis C.K. was born Louis Székely in 1964 in Washington, D.C. He got into writing late-night television after noticing that his mother had “only bad television” to watch when she got home from work.
His controversies started to come to light in 2017, right as the #MeToo movement was taking off. It began when the release of his film I Love You Daddy, was canceled mere hours before the premiere. The plot centered around a TV writer (played by C.K.) who’s daughter started a relationship with a man 50 years older than her. Already a morally gray plot that was a thinly veiled Woody Allen homage, it took on a new light with the 2017 report of five women accusing him of sexual assault.
Spanning from the late 1990s to 2005, five women detailed accounts of C.K. stripping naked and masturbating in front of them without their consent and while they were clearly uncomfortable.
When first confronted about these rumors in an interview by Vulture in 2016, he said “I don’t care about that, that’s nothing to me. That’s not real. [...] If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head. I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after.”
His stance changed drastically after the New York Times dropped a report on him that included quotes by multiple witnesses and victims. He released a statement that began with the words “These stories are true.”
He then continues, “What I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your d*** isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.” This sort of blame-shifting and saying that he ‘didn’t learn until too late’ not to expose himself to women who didn’t ask for it is a clear excuse. It’s a way to put the fault onto his supposed naiveté (although he was in his late 20s and early 30s at the time).
Perhaps the most ironic part about these accounts of his disgusting behavior is that he often makes jokes about masturbation and other uncomfortable topics. That was, until these reports dropped, his unique brand of comedy. Now, people are wondering whether his jokes about pedophilia, necrophilia, and racist jokes reflect his beliefs and actions as well.
In his most recent special, Sorry, he jumps into more masturbation jokes and addresses the situation: “I like jerking off, I don’t like being alone, that’s all I can tell you. I get lonely, it’s just sad. I like company. I like to share. I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark. You’d gather folks and amaze them.”
Then, in perhaps the most insensitive, racist, misogynistic, and disgusting joke of all time, he compares the women he masturbated in front of to enslaved people: ”So to assume that she likes it is like if they heard [enslaved people] singing in the field and you’re like, ‘Hey, they’re having a good time out there.'” C.K. immediately jumps into his controversies and yet doesn’t take responsibility.
C.K. and Chappelle are prime examples again of the downtrend in comedy as older, unrelatable men attempt unsuccessfully to grasp at the dying strands of an industry they once owned. The industry still supports them and puts them on a pedestal. It’s our job as an audience to stop taking their stupidity and bigotry, and stop watching their shows.
