Few challenge the new intolerance as effectively and naturally as Mr Chappelle.
There is something a tad disquieting about Dave Chappelle’s demeanour in his new Netflix stand-up special, The Closer, filmed in Detroit. For a while, as I watched him joke about coronavirus, racism and the trans question, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then it struck me. It was his lack of nerves that felt unnerving. Here was a man making gags about some of the most vexed topics of our time, even going so far as to joke about trans women’s ‘vaginas’ (‘I’m not saying it’s not pussy, but it’s Beyond Pussy or Impossible Pussy’). And yet he displayed neither the darting-eye angst that so often accompanies the saying of unsayable things, nor the smug self-satisfaction of those who blaspheme against woke orthodoxies for the thrill of it. No, this was a man calmly, funnily saying what he believes to be true, as if he were compelled to do so, as if he could do no other. And that, in this era in which people either sheepishly duck controversy or hug the hell out of it for the retweets, feels unusual, and bracing.
