Dave Chappelle Punches Up

According to Nietzsche, maximum nihilism is reached in the overthrow of old systems by actions that amount to total destruction: To be nihilistic, one must lack the capacity to go beyond obliteration. At least since Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial, this has arguably been the role of the comedian in the world of show business: to search, destroy, and savage establishment institutions that the bourgeoisie views as sacrosanct, usually without much concern for empathy or collateral damage.

The problem is, we’re so divided today that defining the establishment (especially in comedy) has become as dizzying an affair as distinguishing civilians from enemy combatants in urban warfare.

Is Hannah Gadsby a rebel or is she the status quo? Probably both, but the media entities that promote her would like you to remain ignorant of the inconvenient fact that she has more cultural veto power than Dave Chappelle. If Gadsby were to go on social media and campaign against a comedian she finds “homophobic” or “transphobic,” she could count on support from the press and from influential activists like Roxane Gay, and her target would face near-inevitable cancellation.

Dave Chappelle has no such veto power or capacity for that kind of political action. He’s a comedian; he is not an activist. Sure, he’s wealthier, more famous, and more respected in comedy clubs than Gadsby — but Chappelle cannot launch a takedown campaign that could threaten Gadsby’s social standing, while she could do it to him with relative ease. Chappelle is one homophobic or transphobic comment away from being boycotted by clubbable woke comedians. Which is why his comedy is a rather genius combination of nihilism and defensive maneuvering. This is how you know Dave Chappelle hasn’t actually said anything homophobic or transphobic—there would be no new Netflix special if he had.

But still, I ask, who is the current establishment? And is Dave Chappelle or Hannah Gadsby part of it? It depends on what you believe the function of comedy to be.

Currently, there’s a civil war in which one side thinks comedy has a responsibility to be a moralizing political tool for progressivism, and the other sees its goal as something more nihilistic: “punching up” against the uniform and coordinated efforts of the high priests of culture.

For the ascendant woke minority who wield most of the cultural power — a group including Gadsby and her publicity machine — punching down is a patriarchal power-play. Sometimes, this is true — but certainly not in today’s show business where the oppressed have become the oppressors. And so it is in their best interest to ignore the appalling amount of power they possess by redirecting all the focus to the grotesque barbarism of Donald Trump. If “President Pussy-Grabber,” the politically incorrect person with the penis, has all the power, then the likes of Ms. Gadsby, etc., are the rebels —never mind that moralistic pedagogy is inherently in opposition to rebellion, especially in comedy.

Historically, for generations, it was clear that “the establishment” in America was the Christian right or the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) majority who ran the publishing and TV networks. That’s who the comedian pelted from the 1960s onward. Those are the groups Bill Hicks targeted in the early nineties. But they no longer control the culture.

In the 1980s, MTV was broadcast through cable networks run by conservative moguls like John Malone; the president was conservative, and most of the studios, sports leagues, publishing giants, and record labels had either a conservative bent or functioned within a traditionalist framework. This was the establishment Bill Hicks made fun of — and now, it has gone woke. Most of today’s entertainment and media moguls either subscribe to woke orthodoxy or at least conform to it under the watchful eye of internet monitors.

The digital mob, as some call it, can strong-arm corporations into channeling its talking points. You see this in Gillette’s advertising strategy, which risks the bottom line in order to toe the party line. You see this with Nike sponsoring radically woke figures like Colin Kaepernick. Why? Because woke is fashionable. So, is Colin Kaepernick the establishment or the underdog? If you agree with him, he’s Che Guevara. If you disagree with him, he’s as corporate as a lucrative Nike contract and shoe deal.

Today’s woke minority, which includes Kaepernick and Gadsby, holds sway over most of the American media the way conservative moguls once held sway over television. This is important, because it’s the media that decide what kind of content future generations will consume. They also offer the consumer reports of culture.

For the non-woke majority, which includes average Americans who don’t work for the media or Hollywood, punching down is now punching up, because they feel culturally voiceless: they have no say in how culture is communicated to the masses or what is voted up or down as acceptable or problematic. These are parents who feel powerless as Hollywood educates their children. These are angst-ridden teenagers who don’t feel accepted by the mean girls or woke activists in cardigan sweater and slim-fitted blue jeans. For non-woke folks who have working-class jobs, who are tired of all the speech-policing and the internet shaming, punching the woke minority provides a feeling of crisp and sensational relief — like downing a can of ice-cold Pepsi at a sweltering filling station.

Of course, this is exactly how the woke minority feels when a feminist comedian makes fun of Trump’s penis, or when Gadsby slams masculinity, or when a female comic opens with, “I’m a feminist,” as the audience stands up and roars in celebration — they feel as empowered as they would at a religious revival or rock concert. For them, comedy that negates this feeling is problematic. For them, Dave Chappelle is the pimple-faced hacker punching-up at the keyboard, trying to infiltrate their system and infect it with a virus. He’s the substitute teacher who dares to freestyle around the established curriculum. He’s the punk rocker who doesn’t want to play in the right key.

Reactionaries like the folks at The Federalist have their own Dave Chappelle complex. They have tried to co-opt him by remixing his joke on abortion to tease their followers with the claim that he’s “subversively pro-life.” He is nothing of the sort, and it’s too bad that such messaging plays right into the left’s desire to make comedy as a vehicle of political propaganda. According to his misguided right-wing fans, Dave Chappelle is punching up on abortion. It’s as desperate a cling to a celebrity as wanting to marry Kanye West just for wearing a MAGA hat unmedicated.

For the non-woke, i.e., the vast majority of Americans, Dave Chappelle produces the sort of comedy that makes them feel accepted and seen.

Let’s get something out of the way here: the intersectional usage of “punching up vs. punching down” is not about defending the oppressed; it’s a bullshit rationalization for defending only those deemed worthy by the woke. It creates a hierarchical shaming system in which any joke directed at the woke is “punching down,” the equivalent of picking on someone smaller — and what better way to protect woke people in positions of cultural influence? This is how the woke minority ensures that they remain majority shareholders in the grand enterprise of the arts.

In today’s American culture, wokeness is privilege. If you’re not woke, then the woke are “the man,” and you want to punch them right in the kisser. For Americans who don’t get to decide who can and cannot have a platform, Dave Chappelle is Johnny Rotten in 1976 snarling into a BBC camera in a mohair sweater and molten-orange hair and saying something vulgar. What is Netflix but the millennial BBC?

Anyone who isn’t woke — or so massively famous as to be immune to most woke takedowns, except for #MeToo — is to some degree canceled in today’s American culture. The canceled masses get the message that everything about them is problematic or downright immoral: their generation, their offensive humor, their incorrect views on abortion or gun rights or the First Amendment, and movies, TV shows, and music they’ve enjoyed for the past 30 years. The only people who can make them feel accepted are the ones who cannot be canceled. The only people who make them feel seen are nihilistic comedians who’ve been grandfathered into an unassailable position of being so famous that even the mainstream media can’t mute or block them.

These are the members of the brat pack of comedy, which includes Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, and Ricky Gervais. They infuriate the woke minority because they are, as the saying goes, “too big to fail.” Which won’t last, but for now, Netflix is willing to profit off their nihilism, which makes the woke minority even angrier. However, Netflix isn’t being ideologically diverse or open minded — just savvy enough to know that most Americans want comedy, not an ideological lecture. They want Dave Chappelle, not woke Dave Chappelle or empathetic Dave Chappelle. They certainly don’t want another moralistic finger-wagging from a snoot like Hannah Gadsby; her audience is the press.

And because the people prefer Chappelle, the woke media take out their anger on their keyboards and punch down with blatant and hypocritical ageism: A comedian like Dave Chappelle — middle-aged, wealthy, straight, male, and uncancelable — has suddenly gone from a civil rights hero in comedy to a bitter old man who’s “dug in his heels” like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008). By the way, this reflexively ageist bullshit ignores the fact the George Carlin was in his comedic prime well into his sixties — and that some of his best bits at the time revolved around making fun of fashionable trends and the peculiar habits of the new generation. Nobody said he was “out of touch.”

Dave Chappelle is suddenly ignorant, according to the new woke Playboy, when just two years ago he was a genius, according to a more Hefnerian Playboy. Because he’s someone who can’t be added to a blacklist or sent packing to the unemployment line like the rest of us, he must be problematized to the point where audiences can longer talk about Dave Chappelle without feeling guilty or suspected of being a Trump supporter. Cancel culture may not extinguish him, but it can turn him into an “unlikable property” — an old Hollywood term for someone you don’t invite to red carpet events or auditions.

This is accomplished by pummeling Google with negative content: headlines that portray Chappelle as an aging, tone-deaf chauvinist. Chappelle is 46, which isn’t old, but he’s “out of touch” when he mocks some of the logical wrestling matches facing trans people. Sarah Silverman, 48, and Chelsea Handler, 44, are “advancing the discourse” and appearing on magazine covers when they mock things the press wants them to mock: masculinity, Trump, capitalism, Christianity, the GOP, machine-guns, etc. The media promotes them while relabeling Dave Chappelle from a rebel into a sellout—or, as The Root put it, the comic that all “the worst white people” love.

Kids love rebels. Convince them that a comedy special on the dangers of “toxic masculinity” is rebellious, and you’ve made intersectionality fashionable. Convince them that Dave Chappelle has lost his edge in his accumulation of wealth, and you’ve made him less appealing. There is no better way to make a punk seem un-punk than to accuse them of selling out. Of course, one can reap financial rewards and still be a rebel, as we see from the careers of Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Hunter S. Thompson. But the press wants you to believe Chappelle is a black Mr. Burns. Why? Because it makes them feel better to be the victim, instead of having to look in the mirror and see what they are: monied liberals who cannot stand it when other monied liberals spoil the mutual admiration party.

Dave Chappelle, a black man with lots of money, is “out of touch” with the white limousine liberals of America because he refuses to talk like them. For everyone else, he’s communicating how fed up they are with woke orthodoxy — which has turned America into a high school cafeteria food fight that’s going to end in a school shooting.

Dave Chappelle is the metaphorical school shooter, and with Sticks and Stones, he’s managed to turn the high school cafeteria into a crime scene where every eyewitness has a different version of events. Was it a roaring success or a flop? The tragically outdated lament of a jaded Gen-Xer or a caustic savaging of the status quo by a rebellious edgelord? That depends on your perspective.

Chappelle’s critics seem to be working off the same humorless script, so much so that they might as well consolidate into one organization: WOKE MEDIA INC.

According to Woke Media Inc., Dave Chappelle is the spokesman for rich people complicit in Trumpism, transphobia, homophobia, and racism; he is the voice of the establishment; he refuses to change (as if this was a crime) and is old and outdated. He is exploiting “old tropes,” as Playboy argued; his comedy is the face of “toxic ideologies,” which is how Complex reviewed it; he is “adamantly opposed to change,” according to The Ringer — as if comedy must be the voice of the woke media’s version of “change.” (What is so wrong with being a traditionalist? Not that Chappelle is one, so the point is moot in this case.)

VICE went so far as to say that Chappelle is a misogynist and a transphobe — apparently not realizing that he’s a comedian and that there’s no evidence to suggest he is misogynistic or transphobic in his day-to-day life. I recall the same lunacy from feminists who reviewed American Psycho and decided that the author, Bret Easton Ellis, was a misogynist because he wrote a novel about a misogynistic killer. Comedy is exaggeration and satire. It is not journalism. It is certainly not something you should fact-check or use to advance the discourse.

Then there’s the argument that Chappelle has a fundamental misunderstanding of power because he’s old and wealthy. When did every culture critic in America become such a Leninist? An editor at Paste argues that Chappelle sounds increasingly entitled because he’s a millionaire, forgetting, of course, that the entire driving force behind comedy is to be so entitled as to stand in front of people and tell them how you feel without ever once asking them how they feel. Every comedian wants special treatment — this is inherently part of their bizarre desire to be heard over everyone else. Hannah Gadsby gets paid handsomely to be entitled; she dresses like an aristocrat and is absolutely loaded.

Of the above reviews, Salon’s was the only one to place a preference on comedy, instead of woke ideology:

Comedians are supposed to express the things we can’t or won’t say. … Black comedy is like The Hunger Games; it’s not a place for respect or rules. People who can’t take that should not tune in, just as I chose not to watch the racist NFL. Comedians aren’t political activists.

But that’s just one positive voice in a massive chorus of condemnation. And while Woke Media Inc. cannot get Dave Chappelle canceled, they can make sure the comedy career of any future Dave Chappelle is aborted long before it reaches viability.

For most Americans, Dave Chappelle is funny because he is ridiculing the shit we’re being told we can no longer ridicule. Chappelle is punching up because he’s voicing the feelings of people who have no voice, or blue checkmarks next to their names — and telling the foot soldiers of the woke media to simply kiss his black ass. This kind of cheeky nihilism is no longer acceptable in comedy. The comic must be idealistically progressive, or else they are “trolling,” which is a criticism The Root levied on Chappelle in a shameful attack on his intelligence.

Chappelle’s greatest talent isn’t his musical delivery, where he transitions like a jazz musician, or the way he scores a smooth uppercut by leaning back on the ropes like a boxer who confuses their opponent — it’s his comedic IQ, where he weaves nihilism together with the storytelling of a sage that oscillates between drunk uncle and aged philosopher. In this regard, he is America’s sharpest battle rapper and he’s dropping diss tracks against the woke orthodoxy.

This is why we need him to remain pure. Whether he’s right or wrong is irrelevant (he’s a comedian, not a journalist). We don’t need him to be a political ally; we don’t need him to be “subversively pro-life”; we need him to level the playing field between the voiceless majority and the sensitivities of the one percent who control 99 percent of the keyboards.

Art Tavana is a Los Angeles-based journalist who writes about music and popular culture. He is a former columnist for L.A. Weekly and Playboy. His work has also appeared in The Spectator, HuffPost, Penthouse, National Review, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @arttavana.