A Long and Annoyingly Nuanced Take on Dave Chappelle’s New Special

People keep asking me what I think about Dave Chappelle’s new standup comedy special, The Closer. Before I go any further, I should probably say something about why I’m getting this question.

If the people asking were friends of mine who hung out and got high and watched funny shit with me on a regular basis in my twenties — I’m 41 and much busier and more boring now! — curiosity about this might make sense. I loved Half-Baked way back when and I was a huge fan of Chappelle’s Show when it was on TV. Just before he walked away from the show, I drove three hours roundtrip from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I was a graduate student at Western Michigan University, to my hometown of East Lansing, to see Chappelle do standup. He was great. In the years that followed, the DVDs of the only two seasons of his show that were ever made got a lot of use in the various apartments where I lived.

The man’s always been on my short list of favorite comedians. So it would make sense if someone who knew all of this about me asked me if I liked his new special. The answer to that question, by the way, leaving out all questions of morality or politics, would be, “It was pretty good. Not his best special — Sticks and Stones was way better — but there were definitely a few parts that made me laugh my ass off.”

But that’s not the reason anyone’s asking. The reason they’re asking is that I wrote a book called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns.

Most of it wasn’t about comedy. The one chapter on the comedy wars (Chapter One: “Lenny Bruce Can’t Save Us”) was the opening hook. I thought it was an accessible way into the larger subjects I wanted to write about. I used the subject of that opening chapter as the title for two reasons. First, people denouncing comedians (who are honestly one of the least politically important groups of people in existence) and thinking that by denouncing them they’re somehow doing something on behalf of liberatory politics struck me as a particularly extreme and vivid example of the much bigger phenomenon of both mainstream liberal and actually-leftist politics being hijacked by a culture of counterproductive moralism. Second, “canceling comedians” alliterates.