In the first few minutes of his latest comedy special, Sticks & Stones, Dave Chappelle takes shots at cancel culture. “I’m gonna try some impressions out,” he announces before adopting his best village idiot voice.
“Uh, duh. Hey! Durr! If you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I’m gonna try to take everything away from you, and I don’t care when I find out,” he says. “Could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now. If I find out, you’re f—ing duh-finished.”
Who’s he impersonating? Everyone watching.
“That’s what the audience sounds like to me,” he explains. “That’s why I don’t be coming out doing comedy all the time, ’cause y’all n—-s is the worst motherf—ers I’ve ever tried to entertain in my f—ing life.”
When Chappelle went on to lament that political correctness inhibits comedy, many reporters were quick to prove him right. One writer at Vice complained that the “special takes the comic’s anti-wokeness schtick to a new level,” concluding that “you can definitely skip” the stand-up routine.
But while Chappelle’s off-color humor may have made him persona non grata among liberal journalists and comedy fans, it has also earned him many accolades.
In October, Chappelle won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. In his acceptance speech, he emphasized that “the First Amendment is first for a reason.” Then, he joked, “Second Amendment is just in case the first one doesn’t work out.”
On Sunday night, Chappelle won his third Grammy in a row for best comedy album. He wasn’t there to accept the award, but the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences deemed him worthy of it, despite the woke scolds. Even Jim Gaffigan, who had just joked about losing to Chappelle, saw it coming.
“Stand-up has such a rich history tied to standing up against censorship,” he said in defense of Chappelle last year. “I love Dave Chappelle. Do I agree with everything he said? No. But I also know that he’s a comedian who’s kind of trying to jab the lion.”
When Chappelle poked fun at liberal mobs refusing to give comedians and other public figures second chances, he was right. Just ask hometown hero-turned-“villain” Carson King, or young adult fiction writers. Fellow comedian Shane Gillis was recently spurned from Saturday Night Live after questionable comments of his began to circulate, though Gillis’s case was perhaps more complicated.
In short, “cancel culture” is a real phenomenon, but it might not be as deadly as critics seem to think. It won’t come for Chappelle because the comedian has no patience for political correctness, and he already has more than enough clout to make up for it.
Chappelle isn’t canceled, but others might not be so lucky.
