The final entry in Dave Chappelle’s run of Netflix specials is yet another master class in comedy. He holds that Detroit audience in the palm of his hand, even as he crosses lines and deliberately uses words he knows they won’t like. And that is because they trust him.
The audience trusts there isn’t any malice behind Chappelle’s jokes. Words that have so much power to hurt when uttered by people who hate are disarmed by him. Chappelle isn’t being offensive as much as he is mocking how we might believe he is that offensive of a person.
Most of Chappelle’s act has characters, who he twists into caricatures to illustrate a perspective, which is that as a Black man there’s a certain insufferable whiteness to many of the gripes that seem to define a good number of the issues of our times.
Chappelle caps it all off with the bittersweet story of Daphne, which punches you right in the gut. All of the previously mentioned characters might be real people, but to the audience none are more real than Daphne.
Oh, and Twitter is not a real place. There may be occasional bursts of realness by people being their authentic selves in threads. But most people just use the site to get away with things they’d never say directly to a person’s face, which makes it pretty damn fake.
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