Entry 584: Are Jokes Funny?

I was planning on writing a longish post about the whole Dave Chappelle, Netflix brouhaha, but life (bike rides, the playground, Ted Lasso, pub trivia) kinda got in the way. Actually what happened is, I wrote a post for my word blog, and that really ate up my blogging time. You can read the post here if you like. It's kinda sorta tangentially related to the Chappelle drama in that it's about banning offensive words from word games.

Anyway... my quick opinion on Chappelle.

I haven't watched any of his Netflix specials, and doubt I will, but I have heard some of the bits from The Closer -- his latest and most controversial one -- and I was not particularly impressed with them. Some of it made me chuckle, but for the most part it really was super mean and very ignorant. I don't necessarily have a problem with the meanness (nothing is that mean when you can turn it off and literally make it go away), but I don't usually find ignorance funny, because the humor is in the truth for me. It's funny because it's true is a cliché for a reason.

With that said, I don't think Netflix should take it down or anything like that. This is not a situation in which somebody is spreading harmful conspiracy theories or planning a coup. It's just a dude telling jokes. If you don't like it, don't watch it. Or do watch it and tell everybody how awful it is; write scathing screeds and reviews; post on social media how awful a comedian and human being Dave Chappelle is. Those are your rights. What you don't have the right to do, in my opinion, is try to get it canceled for everybody. Free speech should also apply to speech you don't like, especially if it's just jokes (admittedly super offensive jokes) told by a guy who everybody knows is just telling jokes.

Also, if the goal is really to prevent Chappelle's speech from being disseminated, protesting it and calling for it's cancellation is the worst thing you can do. If it's really so dangerous and you don't want people to see it, you should just say nothing and let it quickly fade into the night, as it surely would do like every other comedy special.

But I suspect that that's not really the point of the protests. The point is, I think, to make Chappelle and Netflix suffer and atone for their sins of offending the wrong group of people. At the protests this goofy pro-Chappelle troll showed up and one woman even went up to him and repeated "Repent motherfucker! Repent motherfucker!" over and over. (I heard the clip on the latest Blocked and Reported episode.) It really does remind me of the indecency debates of my childhood where it would be a fundamentalist religious group against Frank Zappa on Donahue or something like that. 

And the irony is that a lot of the people who once supported Zappa are now, I suspect, the ones trying to cancel Chappelle. A large swath of the left went off the rails somewhere when it comes to free speech. It used to be a widely-held belief on the left that more speech was a net benefit to society -- that ultimately it helps the oppressed by giving them a voice. This was such an axiom of liberalism that the ACLU would defend the right of literal Nazis to hold marches. But it's not like that anymore. I wish it was, though, because the tides always turn, and at some point it's going to again be "the good guys" whom people are trying to silence.