Dave Chapelle is Hosting SNL Next Week
Transphobia is all that remains of a once powerful voice in comedy. Ah, but will the SNL appearance change all that?
by Evan Urquhart
The comedy of Dave Chappelle will have a chance to reach a national audience again next Saturday, because Chapelle is hosting SNL. Saturday Night Live is a long running late-night sketch comedy program that, like Chappelle, has felt tired and past its peak for quite some time. Will Dave Chappelle use this venue to do more anti-trans jokes? Most definitely! The real question is if we’ll end up hearing about anything else.
Many white folks found Chappelle’s comedy formative. I was a bit too old, myself, but my younger brother was a member of that cohort. He loved The Chappelle Show in the early 00s, and shared some episodes with me (I found it very good). But Chappelle famously grew disillusioned with his white audience, and walked away. He spent years out of the limelight, and even the country. Then, when he returned to doing comedy, he made a joke or two about trans people. Mundane stuff. Caitlyn Jenner, etc. These early-return jokes were transphobic, yes, but they were also just some tired, hacky, throw-away jokes, that in a perfect world for Dave Chappelle wouldn’t have taken attention away from the material he cared about. Material like the stuff that really did help many white people start think differently about race (though not enough—too many white folks took his jokes as support for, not a challenge to, a racist way of looking at the world). This was in a time before most white people had encountered a challenge to their racism like that, but in a perfect world he’d still be such a voice.
But ours is not a perfect world, not for trans people, or for Chappelle.
When trans people pushed back against Chappelle’s lazy, hacky Caitlyn Jenner jokes, (some said offensive, but many who got much less attention just said it was embarrassing material for a talent like Chappelle), a funny thing happened. Call it the JK Rowling effect. Criticism from trans people led to him doubling down, which led to more criticism, which led to more doubling down. This is how a guy who was (probably) mildly transphobic at worst, and who made a couple lazy jokes, ended up burning an entire Netflix special on more transphobic jokes.
If I had to give odds that Chappelle will say something mean about trans people, or at least something self-pitying about the controversy he’s faced, I’d say it’s 100 to 1 in favor of him doing so on SNL next week. Trans people are in his head. He can’t make comedy without talking about us anymore. He feels he’s misunderstood and like a victim, and in his mind it’s trans people at fault. Thus, one of the most incisive minds in comedy has lost that mind because he didn’t realize anyone would defend Caitlyn Jenner. It’s sad, but also: Fuck that guy.