Across his various comedy specials, American comedian Dave Chappelle has said exactly one thing about being a trans woman that I — a trans woman — can really cosign: “it’s kind of fucking hilarious.” He spilled! Whatever deep antipathy Americans have for letting something be two things at the same time, it’s surely making it harder for me to tell jokes: some of the most well-meaning trans allies in my life find it hard to hold in their head the simultaneous ideas that I am a victim of this cruel world, the kind of powerless person that, say, a stranger on a BART train in 2019 would choose to sexually assault, while also, you know, just being a person, someone who can find joy and comedy even in being sexually assaulted. Cutting out a bunch of extraneous clauses and other tedious bullshit, yes, something can be two things at the same time: my experiences as a trans woman can be an indication that society is deeply fucked in some powerful, political way, and thus in need of urgent, radical, political change, and also, at the same time, fodder for a lot of genuinely funny jokes that not only make you uncomfortable but are genuinely funny precisely because they do so.
Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans women tend not to be genuinely funny. Many of his other jokes are, and they are in precisely this way: making you uncomfortable about race is, after all, his main comedic tactic, and in fact, having grown up watching and thinking about many American comedians, Dave Chappelle was, for many years, my favorite. He is certainly a comedian I would feel quite comfortable calling, to use his term for himself, a “comedic genius.” While genius is not a term I think is very useful when discussing art, I know other people disagree, so, agreed: you’re pretty fucking funny, Dave Chappelle!
But this is not all set up for me to say that I dislike his jokes about trans women because I find them personally hurtful. I have been through years of woke psychoanalysis; I have, in the Freudian sense, a strong ego, one generally capable of dispassionately thinking about other people’s negative thoughts about me. I also do not think objecting to his jokes along political lines is worth my time or energy, as I do not share the opinions or investment that many other trans women seem to with respect to who is allowed to talk about what kind of stuff publicly: I don’t really care who’s talking about trans women, at the end of the day; I just care about what they’re saying. And obviously, I do not like what many people — both cis and trans — say about trans women, which is why I had to scaffold the following thesis statement with all of these extraneous clauses instead of just being real with you: I dislike Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans women because I think they’re lazy. I think they are bad jokes. I have aesthetic problems with this comedic fixation he has, and, as a once fan and someone whose own comedic style is still traceably linked to his, I’m disappointed: I think he can do better.
Here’s one example, which comes from his 2017 special Deep in the Heart of Texas, filmed in Austin, Texas, incidentally, the city where I grew up, watched a lot of Dave Chappelle, and, as he says at the start of the show regarding the men he encounters there, often “dressed like a dyke in New York” — spilled again! But let’s get real: the joke in question is about being at a party with rich people, specifically rich gay men and one of their friends, a “tranny, or a drag queen perhaps,” who is currently unconscious on the floor. She is being attended to by the various rich gay men, and Dave Chappelle intervenes to ask, “is he okay?” One of the rich gay men responds, cattily, by saying, “she is fine.” (Ha, ha.) Dave Chappelle then gets so real and serious and says,
Here’s my thing. I support anybody’s right to be whoever they feel like they are inside. I’m your ally in that. However, my question is, to what degree do I have to participate in your self-image? Is it fair that I have to change my whole pronoun game up for this motherfucker? That doesn’t make sense. Seriously.
Now, first things first, remember that this story is fiction. Stand-up comedy is a fictional genre. If you put a real thing that really happened to you into a fictional genre — like, for example, a novel — it is still fiction because that is the agreed-upon condition of the genre; the same is true for stand-up comedy, however often the people who watch it forget this. That Dave Chappelle has concocted this fictional scenario, primarily, it seems, to explain why he is actually a good person who thinks seriously about politics in an interestingly contrarian way, and only secondarily to make us laugh, is evidenced by both where the joke lands (“Seriously.”) and also by the fact that this is a really lazy joke. Anyone with half a brain for comedy can see the punchline coming from a mile away: the idea that, in a scenario like this, woke people would care more about some dumb woke bullshit like pronouns than dangerous realities like a woman ODing is an acceptable basis for a punchline, but even back in 2017, this was firmly hack shit: it’s giving pride flag on a bomb being dropped on people in Afghanistan; it’s giving correcting a Nazi on which “you’re” vs. “your” they use in their Nazi propaganda; it’s fine: these are funny enough things when you see them in a meme you forget in two seconds, but they are not, frankly, worthy of “comedic genius” Dave Chappelle. The best part of the bit is an aside where he does some physical comedy, imitating what he calls “gay CPR,” and doing what’s probably a fairly homophobic impression of some gay men fanning and blowing and doing other gay man shit, which, for all its familiar homophobia, felt narratively unexpected even in the context of the bit and true enough to life to earn a curl at the edge of the mouth from me (sorry fellas! I’ll do my lesbian-solidarity-self-criticism-session posthaste.)
But speaking politically, I actually really like this joke! It’s nice to hear a cis person openly admit that whatever negative feelings they have about a trans person have nothing to do with what the trans person is actually doing, or really anything about the facts of their transition, and is instead just the cis person’s annoyance about having to change anything at all about their own behavior. But there is a problem here: the made-up demand in this made-up scenario for Dave Chappelle to change anything about his own real behavior does not actually come from the made-up trans woman, who, remember, is unconscious on the floor; it comes from her made-up cis friends. The trans woman is, quite literally, incapable of speaking. Even and especially in his made-up fantasy world, Dave Chappelle gets that things generally go better for him when other people speak for trans women. And he gets this because if there is one thing that Dave Chappelle gets, it’s that he is a stand-up comedian, and thus he is the sole author of his made-up fantasy world: regardless of whether or not a real trans woman said any of the things in his jokes that he claims are real things that a real trans woman said, it’s ultimately the real American stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle who decides, genius-ly, if they get said, how they get said, what context they get said in, and so on. He is in control.
So why is this made-up trans woman, and — by that insane logic of generalization both cis and trans people use now to consume and create “media” — thus all real trans women, the target of this annoyance? Trans women are not a monolith, and we do not all demand the same things from people. I am still misgendered these days, both in public and private, and whether or not I correct people — to say nothing of whether or not I think about it for longer than like half a second — entirely depends on the specific situation I am in. Dave Chappelle gets this because like 20 minutes earlier, in that same special, he makes a joke about going to a KFC staffed by uniformed members of the Ku Klux Klan and ignoring their overt racism because he’s hungry; near the end of the joke, he says, “I’m not gonna be mad . . . He’s the one that’s gotta work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, not me.” And that really is, in the final analysis, what it all comes down to: if you have money, if you feel safe, if you can pay for enough woke psychoanalysis to have a strong ego, in the Freudian sense, you can put up with basically whatever interpersonal bullshit someone wants to throw at you. I still sometimes tell people about the time someone called me a “bugheaded tranny bitch” because I think that’s a fun and interesting transphobic turn of phrase, something Dave Chappelle gets, of course, because that special is full of callbacks to the long-ish opening bit about someone throwing a banana peel at him when he was on stage, something he clearly thought was a fun and interesting or at least notable way to do racist prop comedy.
I am doing something here that Dave Chappelle also does quite often, but that generally, under the rubric of contemporary liberal American politics, you are not supposed to do: I am drawing explicit comparisons between white trans life and Black cis life. Dave Chappelle follows that block quote up there with a little bit about how he can’t put on an argyle sweater, use his very funny white person voice, and go ask for a bank loan. But the obstacle there isn’t the theoretical untenability of transracial identity, and thus, by implication, transgender identity; it’s that as a Black man — and more specifically, as world-famous American comedian and “comedic genius” Dave Chappelle, who does, in this very special, also tell jokes about being recognized in public as such — you’ve really got to work a lot harder than that to convince a person working at a bank you’re a white guy. Dave Chappelle also couldn’t dress like a New York dyke and fuck me! Maybe he can start using phrases like “material conditions” and then citing Marxist Feminist texts in a way that makes it clear he’s really thought about the way all of these small interpersonal interactions are dialectically mediated and then given consequences by the large and complex economic structures we live under, but even then, I don’t know — he, specifically, might also need a wig? He can keep his clothes and his dick — I’d even go for the argyle!
Look: my point here is that Dave Chappelle knows exactly what he’s doing. He is very smart, he is very good at writing jokes, and whether he does this cynically, knowing that the cheap outrage and laughter he is sure to get by “punching down” at made-up trans women and then whining about it in the next special will get him yet another special after that, or whether, you know, it’s purely a psychological obsession for him, and he’s sort of just weird as fuck about trans women, or whether it’s a measured balance, I don’t care: I just want him to be funny again.
Most of Dave Chappelle’s comedy is not about trans women: as far as I can tell, the two main things it’s about are cleverly exposing the contradictions of liberal America’s approach to racial politics and also making light of the way women in this country — both cis and trans — are violently abused. Go watch that Austin, Texas special and count the number of jokes about women being violently abused. That the criticisms of how he handles that real misogynistic violence tend not to be what he foregrounds when discussing the political critiques he is often subjected to — and which I am not really concerned with making at length here — just goes to show that, like any good comedian, Dave Chappelle knows how to control your attention. To wit, whatever conclusions he wants to draw by comparing being Black and being trans in this country are usually meaningless when you account for the fact that you can be both Black and trans in this country, something he obviously doesn’t want to do, as he knows that basically no one with a big platform platforms Black trans women, and likewise, he knows that even a white trans woman would never be allowed to respond to him with the kind of platform he has now, certainly not by talking about Blackness publicly the way he talks about transness publicly. Despite all the many things I once knew about rap music, no one will ever pay me a shitload of money to go on a stage, be filmed, and then be streamed, via Netflix, into any interested home in the world just so that I can share my contrarian thoughts on the complicated realities of being a Black man in America — and why would they? Nobody wants that. I don’t want that! But of course, one of the complicated realities of being trans in this country is that, surveys show, a majority of Americans don’t actually personally know any trans people: we exist as an idea they encounter mostly in the news or online, or otherwise as a structurally dehumanized worker they are making use of when we are working retail or doing sex work, which means they end up learning very little about what being trans is actually like and a lot about what people — both cis and trans — want them to think being trans is like. This is all to say, they learn about transness abstractly and politically, not concretely and socially. It is for this reason that many things about being a trans woman are framed in intellectual terms: if you’re a real asshole to me, it’s not because you’re a real asshole but because you haven’t done a PhD in gender theory, something that, when it comes down to it, makes it a lot easier for you to not feel bad about being a real asshole to me.
Dealing with trans people in your life can be hard, but it is one of the most intellectually straightforward things in the world: if you love and care about someone, you will learn to deal with whatever negative emotions you feel about their transness because you love and care about them; if they love and care about you, they will learn to deal with whatever hurt and rage they feel about your negative emotions because they love and care about you. This does not always happen. This does not have to happen. This should not always happen. But it should happen more. It should happen a lot more. That so many formerly loving social relationships in this country are ended by the introduction of transness just speaks to the powerful attachment many people here have to the abstract ideas of things: if you value your abstract idea of what a man or a woman is more than you value, say, your literal, real, actually existing child and their literal, real, actually existing life that they are literally, really, actually just trying to live in the way that feels right and good for them, that is your decision. I am not here to fail your personhood or give your parenting choices a bad grade. I am only here to let you know that that is who you are, and all I would ask you to do is take some real time and really reflect — think about the way you treat the literal, real, actually existing people in your life, take some time, reflect, and please — for the love of the idea of “comedic genius” Dave Chappelle, which I have just now, finally, let go of — please just be so fucking for real.