If you’ve paid any attention to the world of stand-up comedy over the past decade, you’re probably already aware that there are a handful of straight, cisgender, male comedians who like to portray themselves as “edgy” who have made many transphobic jokes and statements and have attracted a great deal of controversy as a result. The most prominent of these comedians are Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, and Michael Che.
This subject has come up in the news recently, because, on 5 October 2021, Netflix released a seventy-two minute stand-up comedy special starring Dave Chappelle titled The Closer. In the special, Chappelle devotes large chunks of his time to mocking LGBTQIA+ people and transgender women in particular. He repeats many age-old transphobic talking points and hackneyed jokes that people have made a million times before. Among other things, he says that TERFs (i.e., “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”) see trans women the same way Black people see white people wearing blackface before explicitly saying he agrees with them and calling himself “Team TERF,” he implies that trans women’s genitalia are in some sense “fake” by comparing them to plant-based meat, and he expresses disgust over having been “trapped” into calling a trans woman “beautiful.”
In this article, I don’t intend to go in depth about why the things Chappelle says in the special are inaccurate, bigoted, and harmful to trans people, since his lines are so unoriginal that they have all already been debunked a million times. (In fact, I literally debunked some of his exact claims myself in this article I wrote in November 2020 and this other article I wrote in March 2021.) Instead, I want to talk about Chappelle’s justification for what he said, which is the exact same justification that many other transphobic comedians like to use. Chappelle and his defenders have tried to justify his statements in the special by claiming that he says these things in the name of comedy and free speech. I want to address why “comedy” and “free speech” are not inherently benign and are not adequate moral justifications for saying things that are bigoted.
Continue reading ““Comedy” and “Free Speech” Are Not Moral Justifications for Bigotry”