Sticks and stones will not break our unwoke bones
When a quiet soul I once knew visited a minor theocracy, she did something uncharacteristic in her hotel room each night.
After a day on the tense streets, where each word and gesture was as invigilated as her sleeve-length, she had pent-up impulses to release. And so, alone at last, she found herself dancing and swearing for minutes at a time in a kind of ecstatic delirium. She had no previous (or subsequent) interest in such behaviour. It was precisely the bar on it that had created the urge.
I remembered her story when I saw that opinions have
diverged on the newest work by Dave Chappelle. The man who was perhaps the first great comic of the century has lost critics with his militantly unwoke Netflix special
To compensate, he has to make do with the support of
at an approximate count almost everyone else. As of September 5, the reviewaggregating website Rotten Tomatoes reports a critics’ score of 33%, audience score of 99%.
Many people refuse to hear a word against this ripest of stand-up performances. They include some of the least likely chauvinists I know, and members of almost every group it makes savage sport of: women, gay people, assorted races. Watching the show, you sense the audience have come in from a tightly policed outerworld to partake of illicit fun they did not know they craved. Critics will hope that
is the last stand of oldfashioned comedy. For better or worse, I suspect it is actually the future of entertainment.
Chappelle intuits that, in sensitive times, when delicacy towards others is all but enforced, there is enormous latent demand for the opposite. This demand exists even among those who do not sympathise a jot with his opinions, whether about #MeToo (“I’m what’s known on the streets as a victim-blamer”) or about the LGBTQ+ community (“alphabet people”).
It is the subversive frisson they are after: the cocking of a snook at something, the release of tension. The content of the jokes is a means to that end the freeze on certain kinds of art that some have expected since #MeToo and the rise of campus censorship might never transpire.
In fact, over time, our culture might become all the coarser for those movements, through no conscious doing of their own. The more constrained people feel in public discourse, the more relief they will seek in entertainment.
You need not view any of this as desirable to recognise its likelihood. It is with zero relish that I predict a boom in all sorts of dreary shock tactics in the arts, on an aesthetic par with a child saying “boobies” in adult company.
There are moments in
when Chappelle resorts to this kind of too-easy win. Shut your eyes during the ethnic impressions and you could be front row at a Roy “Chubby” Brown gig in a Walsall working men’s club midway into the Ted Heath premiership. He makes a very earlynoughties (and very American) equation of France with effeteness always an odd take on a culture that can leave the Anglophone world standing with its machismo.
But if Chappelle can wow audiences when so far south of his best, that only makes my case. It is not the quality of his work that is the draw. It is the transgressiveness of it.
Netflix, Hollywood and other content factories cannot help but spot the failure of the critics to speak for the broad market here. If there is an unmet demand for a rawer kind of entertainment, it will not remain unmet for very long. Studios will answer to the commercial incentive, not the moral pressure.
At 46, Chappelle might be reading the zeitgeist better than the cub critics who see in him a reactionary uncle. If so,
will be the beginning of something, not the end of something. The dread is what starts as an impish desire to rebel becomes vicious nihilism or just lousy art. Call it political incorrectness gone mad. /©