Chappelle explores Cosby, daily life

It was probably inevitable that Dave Chappelle would do the most provocative comedy on Bill Cosby.

After all, no comic has done more buttonpushing jokes about the crime and punishment of famous black men.

Yet in his terrific new special, “The Age of Spin” — available now on the streamingservice Netflix along with an uneven but still riveting second hour, “Deep in the Heart of Texas” — the tension rose when Chappelle brought up fan reaction to his jokes about the Cosby rape accusations.

Is Chappelle about to be the first major comic to defend Cosby? He is not, but what he does do is articulate what a devastating loss it is that the cultural legacy of Cosby is being wiped away from popular memory.

As a comic who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, Chappelle explains how much Cosby meant to him without playing down the accusations.

Still, it takes guts to close a show, as he does, with an argument for complexity in our assessment of Cosby.

Chappelle’s daring insistence on challenging his audience, his eagerness to go there, is what makes the arrival of these specials such an invigorating — and possibly polarizing — event.

In “Spin,” Chappelle builds sweeping historical premises that position him as an elder statesman. “I’m from a different time,” he says, before describing how jarring it was to watch the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explode live on television while in school. Sharing that disaster together was a touchstone for many of his generation.

Singling out a kid in the audience, he says: “For your generation, the space shuttle blows up every day.”

His point seemed to be that communal tragedy and anger have become part of a steady diet in our social-media feeds. The result is that people stop caring, retreating to their phones.

Chappelle might criticize the younger generation, but he stops short of anything approaching a lecture, always far more comfortable skewering his own insecurities and irresponsibility.