Dave Chappelle says trans jokes were misconstrued: ‘People would think it’s me vs the gay community’
Dave Chappelle. (Getty)
Dave Chappelle is once again defending his jokes about trans people, arguing that the media – and therefore audiences – have misunderstood both his intentions and the culture of stand-up itself.
Speaking on a 6 May episode of the IMO podcast, Chappelle said: “People would think it’s me vs. the gay community. I never looked at it like that.”
Chappelle argued that criticism surrounding his material often came from people outside comedy spaces, adding that comedy clubs contain “every type of person you can imagine”, including transgender comedians, all sharing and debating different perspectives without trying to “silence one another”.
He also pushed back against the way jokes are reported in headlines and articles, saying: “Nothing makes a comedian madder than reading his joke wrong in the paper.” He described comedy as an art form built around testing cultural boundaries, explaining: “We are playing with whatever the culture is made of, and we break it down and we get it right or we get it wrong. But in all art, if it’s going to be good or even hopefully great, you gotta have a margin of error.”
Back in 2021, Chappelle included a number of jokes in his Netflix special, The Closer, about gay and trans people, while calling himself a member of “team TERF”. He and Netflix boss Ted Sarandos defended the so-called jokes, but trans employees walked out in protest at the time.
Chappelle’s 2023 special, The Dreamer, included a joke about himself writing a play to repair his relationship with the trans community: “It’s a very sad play, but it’s moving. It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n****. It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play, she dies of loneliness ’cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her,” he said.
On 15 April, Chappelle appeared on an episode of NPR’s Newsmakers, hitting out at Republicans for “weaponising” his transgender jokes, saying: “I did resent that the Republican Party ran on transgender jokes. You know, I felt like they were doing a weaponised version of what I was doing. That’s not what I was doing.”
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