Dave Chappelle has released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, which is full of jokes about the trans community and disabled people.

“I love punching down!” he tells the audience, in a one-hour show that landed on the streaming service today (31 December).

It’s his seventh special for Netflix and comes two years after his last one, the highly controversial release The Closer.

That programme was criticised for its relentless jokes about the trans community, and Chappelle revisits the topic in his new show.

He tells jokes about trans women in prison, and about trans people “pretending” to be somebody they are not.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What. The. Fuck.

    I’ve never been the biggest Chappelle fan, but years ago, before he started going down this path, I had basic respect for him as a comedian. Now he’s actually promoting punching down? And he didn’t feel like he was punching down enough with trans people, so he had to be an ableist as well as a transphobe?

    And Netflix would not have put this on their site sight unseen, so they 100% knew that this was a celebration of attacking vulnerable people.

    Christ, even when I was in high school I knew that the guy who pushed the kid in the wheelchair over onto their side was a shithead and so did almost everyone else. So basically Chapelle wants his fan base to be the little weasel kid who stands behind the bully with a grin on his face because someone else is getting it when it could have been them.

    I wonder if anyone will come in here and defend him with some mumbo jumbo about free speech?

      • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Chappelle still tries to act like he’s one of the disenfranchised black people, while living in a mansion and hanging out with Elon Musk.

        • NatakuNox@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Money literally rotts the brain. Study after study shows wealthy people become more sociopathic as they accumulate more wealth and power. We shouldn’t cap wealth just because it’s morally right, it also prevents those in power from becoming all consuming sociopaths.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      1 year ago

      and chris rock! i was just thinking how these 2 used to be very funny, if not somewhat irreverent… i get it. but now theyre both on this conservative soap box its so weird!

      theyve become the anti-carlin!

      • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Carlin is Carlin. Everybody else only tries to approach him or has given up on the idea of doing it. The man had a 50+ year career with a consistent upwards trend. In 4 years we will be at the 20th anniversary of his death. And the man is still relevant and funny to this day.

        Chappelle, Seinfeld, Allen, etc. All just hacks who got lucky. Would anyone even know who Seinfeld was without Larry David? That man is another gem for sure.

        I can’t even watch or recommend others to watch half baked any more between Chappelle and Bruer.

      • almar_quigley@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I haven’t heard about Rock. That’s disappointing. It’s a common thing with comedians these days to get upset if their comedy either goes to far or just isn’t funny and blame it on people being too sensitive. It feels like that’s been pushing some of them to the right even though that’s not really the issue they are being confronted with.

        • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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          1 year ago

          nothing quite as egregious as chappelle, but his recent special was completely class tone-deaf, and boring. ’ i dont enjoy politically correct terminology’, ‘i am rich, entitled human’, ‘will smith sucks’ were the main tones i remember from watching his last special… that and thinking, ‘when did chris rock get boring’?

          • 🖖USS-Ethernet@startrek.website
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            1 year ago

            For me, the dividing line when he became unfunny was when he started being in every Sandler movie. It was somewhere along the way that all of those comedians in those movies just lost it.

    • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      A lot of transphobes, white-supremacists, and similar ideologues would support eugenics for disabled people so that isn’t a far off description. Whether comedians like him realize it or not, they are normalizing social darwinism essentially.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      At this point I feel like Netflix is encouraging this kind of content.

      • Microw@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Netflix is a bunch of suits. In their perfect world they can cater different content to trans people and to transphobic people at the same time, in order to make maximum money.

        • HuntressHimbo@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          And on top of that they know that outrage fuels views. They keep making inflammatory content that will outrage one side and get the other to spite-view it. Of course inflammatory content to left wingers tends to be bigotted and hateful, while inflammatory to right wingers tends to just be anything not overwhelmingly white, straight, and patriarchal.

    • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I read a view that not punching down is offensive and not right.

      See it’s based on everyone being equal and there is nothing wrong with being disabled (the person mentioning this view was disabled). So if you rip on all your friends for whatever, but then don’t rip on your disabled friend for being disabled then that is treating them like that can’t handle it or that they aren’t equal.

      Honestly it’s comedy, some isn’t but most is offensive. Comedy doesn’t have to be for everyone but I don’t think it should be stopped just because someone doesn’t like it. The whole punching up, punching down thing is just weird. It’s a self imposed rule people treat like law.