00:00:48.860Tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people.
00:00:52.640When we did a retrospective on Bill Burr's fading career, we tried to find the precise moment that Burr went from being an entertaining comedian, which he was at one point, believe it or not, to a joyless, unfunny, predictable shill for the political establishment.
00:01:08.180At some particular moment in time, he made this transition from a world-class comedian to a guy with the sense of humor and comic instincts of a public school teacher.
00:01:18.360and scholars and historians have debated when this shift took place and why exactly and we
00:01:24.620concluded that there's a lot of truth to the theory that he married a black feminist
00:01:27.900and the rest was history no man's sense of humor can survive a marriage to a feminist neither can0.93
00:01:34.920his bank account or his self-respect or in many cases his children so the once edgy and funny0.64
00:01:41.240comedian is now a finger-wagging hr representative and that's a fate that has claimed many others
00:01:46.440Howard Stern, a whole host of other Gen X and Boomer comedians. George Carlin was perhaps a
00:01:52.240pioneer in this regard. He was one of the first major comedians to deflate like a balloon toward
00:01:58.860the end of his life, becoming a limp, sad, droopy shell of what he had been. He stopped telling
00:02:05.260jokes entirely and just sort of sat on stage delivering philosophical exposition that seemed
00:02:11.100really insightful and interesting if you were a freshman in high school enrolled in special ed
00:02:15.820classes. But to anyone who went to a Carlin show expecting maybe a joke or two, it was confusing
00:02:21.920and disappointing. And a similar transformation has occurred now with Dave Chappelle. Now,
00:02:27.460Chappelle has always been overrated, but he at least used to, he used to tell jokes. You know,
00:02:33.040he'd give this set up and then he'd land on the punchline. That's how jokes work, in case you
00:02:38.180were curious. And sometimes the punchlines were pretty good. He had a routine that he did 20
00:02:43.560years ago where he, they still see the clip sometimes where he critiqued the residents
00:02:47.560of Sesame Street for their unfair treatment of Oscar the Grouch. It's not funny when I retell
00:02:52.560it, but from Chappelle, it was amusing. And mostly though, Chappelle has spent his career,
00:02:58.700aside from the stuff about Sesame Street and some other stuff, he's essentially been making the same
00:03:03.920three jokes about white people for, you know, 30 years. And the media treated him like Jesus back
00:03:09.820in the day for that reason alone he was revolutionary he made fun of white people
00:03:14.560it all is constantly doing these media profiles about him the black comedian who makes fun of0.87
00:03:21.120white people who'd ever heard of that who'd ever heard of a black comedian making fun of white0.57
00:03:25.540people no black comedian ever done that before with the exception of every black comedian who
00:03:31.860had ever lived but aside from them it had never been done and chappelle's show on comedy central
00:03:38.320is consequently discussed with the same reverence that, you know, people talk about like Citizen
00:03:43.840Kane or Shakespeare. But if you go back and watch Chappelle's show now, you'll actually be shocked
00:03:49.840by how lame a lot of it is. And I'm not just saying that now, it's true. And it's not because
00:03:54.840it's offensive or anything like that. It just lands flat. There are about five Chappelle's show skits
00:03:59.360that you remember because they introduced catchphrases into the culture. What you might
00:04:04.360not realize or recall, and I know I didn't until I went back and checked, is that those five skits
00:04:09.480are it. It's like the only thing the show ever did. That's it. That's all. It's all there ever
00:04:15.400was. And when Chappelle ended his show, Comedy Central immediately went out seeking another
00:04:20.220black comedian to do skits about white people. And that gave birth to Key and Peele, which actually0.55
00:04:25.860holds up much better than Chappelle's show, probably because they produced a bunch of skits
00:04:30.700that they did a lot of race stuff, but they also did a bunch of skits that have nothing to do with
00:04:33.900race at all. And then Peel left and he started making horror movies where every single movie
00:04:39.500is about how white people are evil. So regression to the mean, I suppose. But at least back then,0.98
00:04:46.000Chappelle was trying to be funny. In recent years, however, he's taken the Bill Burr and
00:04:51.800George Carlin and Howard Stern route. He ran out of jokes years ago. He told his three white people
00:04:59.700are lame jokes and couldn't think of a fourth. So now he wanders around stage telling these long,0.98
00:05:06.220discursive stories, philosophizing, impressing himself, if no one else, with how insightful
00:05:12.720he thinks he is. And performing at Madison Square Garden on Saturday, Chappelle had one of these
00:05:18.740moments where he reminded everyone, once again, that he's no longer even vaguely interested in
00:05:24.820comedy or jokes or making people laugh. He took the opportunity without any kind of punchline in
00:05:30.540mind to declare that he felt good about the fact that Charlie Kirk was publicly executed
00:05:35.720because of his political beliefs. Watch.
00:05:41.240I feel upset. It's scary being a public speaker.
00:05:46.700And I mean, look, ever since that guy, Charlie Kirk, got murdered, and I shouldn't say this publicly, but I feel better.
00:06:05.240I know I shouldn't say that, but it's just a feeling.
00:06:10.960I didn't ask you this way. I'd just be driving around like, why am I in such a good mood?
00:06:16.700Now, there's no joke here. There's no punchline. Like millions of other leftists, he's just happy
00:06:29.160that Charlie Kirk, a young man and a father of young children, was shot in the neck on camera.
00:06:35.400That's it. That's the whole point. That's the only takeaway. And to be clear, this was not an ad
00:06:40.280lib. He's apparently said the same thing before, most recently at a show in Toronto, although they
00:06:45.740confiscate phones at these shows apparently out of embarrassment and the footage hasn't leaked so
00:06:50.780we don't know exactly what he said but i saw people posting at the time that he joked about
00:06:55.460charlie kirk in a show in october which makes this even worse not because it's offensive but
00:06:59.440because it's so incredibly lazy and witless this is a written rehearsed material apparently
00:07:06.580it's an offense against comedy more than anything else i mean saying that you're happy someone died
00:07:12.540is not a punchline, especially if it's actually just a genuine reflection of what you truly think.
00:07:19.660It could be the setup to a punchline. A comedian may say something shocking or outrageous and then
00:07:25.940follow it with a punchline that subverts your expectations, goes in a direction you weren't
00:07:30.960expecting, somehow draws comedy out of that dark place. Louis C.K. is especially good at that,
00:07:38.560which is why he's maybe the only comedian of his generation that has managed to produce a funny
00:07:43.540comedy special at any point this decade but chappelle doesn't subvert expectations or take
00:07:49.360the conversation in a surprising direction or deliver any sort of punchline at all what you
00:07:54.520just heard there is the whole joke which is to say it's not a joke it's just a statement
00:07:59.020and making an outrageous statement with no setup or punchline is at best the comedy of a 75 iq
00:08:07.700YouTuber commenter. It's the comedy of a Nigerian bot on Twitter. It's not the comedy you'd expect0.62
00:08:14.460from a guy performing at Madison Square Garden. And yes, that footage does not include the full
00:08:20.060context of his statements. That's true. A lot of people were saying, well, you know, in context,
00:08:25.120it might not be so bad. But when you look at additional footage that's leaked from the set,
00:08:30.240it turns out that the full context is actually even worse, if anything. Watch.
00:08:34.520so this apparently was not like him saying this thing about how i'm happy charlie kirk was killed
00:08:52.300and then you know he eventually comes back around to sort of uh critique uh that that very statement
00:08:59.160or or you know he was trying to get the reaction from the crowd he comes back around to like make
00:09:03.220a point about the crowd's reaction or something. He apparently didn't do that. You know, that would
00:09:07.820be interesting. That could be an interesting thing to do in a comedy show, but Dave Chappelle's not
00:09:12.540smart enough to think of something like that, and he has no interest in doing it. He said he's
00:09:18.500gotten credit for a long time for being this subversive comedian. He's almost never said
00:09:23.300anything subversive. Go back to Chappelle's show's days. This is just white people are dorks,
00:09:28.320Black people are cool. That's pretty much been it his entire career. It's actually not subversive1.00
00:09:34.020at all. It's very safe. The one exception is when he got into the trans stuff. We'll talk about that
00:09:38.880later. But, you know, it is surprising and somewhat encouraging, I guess, that if you listen to these
00:09:43.840clips, the audience at Madison Square Garden didn't entirely burst out laughing. That's what
00:09:49.900you'd expect, given how leftists have been celebrating Kirk's murder all over the internet
00:09:53.540for the past year. But Chappelle's audience, some of them, seemed shocked by what he said more than
00:09:59.580anything. So maybe there's some decency left, even in a city like New York. Of course, the glass
00:10:04.500half empty perspective is that it's a sad thing to take solace in the fact that only half of the
00:10:10.340audience at Madison Square Garden laughed about Charlie Kirk getting murdered rather than the
00:10:14.180whole audience. In any case, I've seen, and keep in mind, when he first brought up Charlie Kirk
00:10:20.620got murdered, there were cheers in the crowd before he even got to the quote-unquote punchline,
00:10:25.980which tells you something. Not the whole crowd cheering, but you definitely heard them.
00:10:32.400In any case, I've seen some people suggest that, well, you know, Chappelle's doing what comedians
00:10:36.900are supposed to do. He's being transgressive. He's saying something you're not supposed to say,
00:10:41.960and therefore he's brave. He's carrying on the time-honored tradition of comedians who aren't
00:10:46.800afraid to speak truth to power, etc. But there are a few major problems with this argument. First of
00:10:52.880all, everybody on the left mocks Charlie Kirk, so this doesn't even qualify as a thing you aren't
00:10:57.860supposed to say. Second, no, the point of comedy is not merely to say things you're not supposed
00:11:03.640to say. Anyone can do that. Anyone can stand on stage and just rattle off a series of statements
00:11:09.360that will seem offensive to normal, decent people. The art of comedy, again, is to find the funny
00:11:16.000thing in those dark places, the setup and the punchline. Chappelle skipped that step as he
00:11:23.220usually does now. That's what, as he usually does, he just says a bunch of stuff. There's no joke.
00:11:30.280He's not making a joke. He's just giving podcast monologues. Okay. And it's not comedy. It's the
00:11:39.280equivalent of standing on stage and saying, so a rabbi and a nun walked into a bar.
00:11:46.420And then just moving on to the next bit. You skip the joke part. I got the rabbi and nun.
00:11:53.860What about it? I mean, are you just making an observation about a couple of random bar patrons?
00:12:00.140Because if so, that's not a joke. That's just an observation.
00:12:03.720third again this is what he really believes you know if i get on stage and say for instance
00:12:11.120george floyd was a drug-addled vagrant who died of an overdose and his death was his own fault
00:12:16.980that would qualify as something you aren't supposed to say but it's not a joke it's not
00:12:22.040comedy because it's just a plain statement of a thing i actually believe and the thing i believe
00:12:28.380in this case and which is definitely true may be offensive to some people that doesn't make it a
00:12:33.700joke. And if I make that statement, which I have made plenty of times, and someone becomes
00:12:39.720offended, and I respond by saying, hey, man, relax, it's comedy. What, you don't like comedy?
00:12:46.620What are you against comedy? No, see, that wouldn't make me a comedian. It would make me a coward,
00:12:53.160too afraid to stand by my own beliefs. Because when you make the statement, and then there's
00:12:58.980no punchline, and then when someone gets offended, you say, hey, I was joking.
00:13:03.700The only way it was a joke is if you don't really think that.
00:41:07.240okay what the really is it's a it's a perfect it's a perfect clip in some ways um to have the
00:41:15.460white npr like it's it's your when you make fun of white people it's so great can you can you do
00:41:22.220the bit when you make fun of it's so amazing you're it's you're a genius unfortunately his0.79
00:41:27.740white accent doesn't actually sound like an actual white person but um other than that he
00:41:32.420nailed it i mean as a white guy who talks in monotone for a living i can say with some
00:41:35.960authority that this isn't what white people sound like exactly. By the way, you know, the white NPR
00:41:40.060lady eats it up. And of course, a white comedian had been talking to her and started talking in1.00
00:41:44.360ebonics, which is actually how a lot of black people talk. She, you know, probably would not
00:41:48.500have been as enamored with it. But NPR had no problem with it because for decades now,
00:41:53.240the entire leftist agenda has been premised on going after white people. And now, particularly0.81
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00:44:41.000To the extent that Chappelle has done anything interesting or brave in his entire career,0.83
00:44:46.240it was to mock transgenderism. That's one of the few times when he actually went after
00:44:52.240something that was politically incorrect. It was one of the few times when he went after an actual
00:44:57.040sacred cow. Again, being a black guy in the 2000s, making fun of white people, nothing bold about0.89
00:45:01.700that. Everyone loves it. But going after the trans agenda, okay. And so for a few years,0.96
00:45:09.460he went after, you know, he started making trans jokes. He did it after we had already made it safe
00:45:14.620to go there, kind of like how he did a routine on Jussie Smollett years after the fact. And in the
00:45:20.300spirit of openness and honesty, I think we can now admit that we as conservatives gave Chappelle
00:45:24.900way too much credit for making a few trans jokes. I'm certainly guilty of that. I'll admit. In our1.00
00:45:31.420defense, this was at a time when every major institution in the country had gone insane and
00:45:36.600everybody was insisting that men in dresses were actually women. So we were desperate. We were
00:45:40.700desperate for anyone in mainstream culture to simply acknowledge the basic reality that was
00:45:45.840sitting in front of all of our faces. It's like if you're sitting in staring at a brick wall and
00:45:50.160there's a bunch of people around you saying there's no brick wall there there's no wall
00:45:52.780one person comes along and says oh yeah no there's there's a wall there it's like you you know you're
00:45:57.200you're grateful for that uh even more grateful than you should be because all he really did was
00:46:00.560just say yeah there's a brick wall there after you had already said it but um but still you know
00:46:07.060and and that's probably what provoked uh a more enthusiastic reaction on the right than than was
00:46:11.520warranted and then chappelle came along with a lot of material like this watch when i watch sports
00:46:17.220I'll be thinking about, like, like, think about, okay, okay, say, say LeBron James, uh, changed his gender, you know what I mean, okay, can he stay in the NBA, or, because he's a woman, does he have to go to the WNBA, where he will score 840 points a game?
00:46:38.820what does it actually mean to be equal you know what i mean like women are actually equal to men
00:46:50.580then there would be no wnba would there you would just be good enough to play in the nba with us
00:46:57.940or here's another idea that's going to be very controversial you could shut
00:47:04.420now i agree with the point obviously and the joke is fine um and uh you know we gave chapelle a lot
00:47:17.060of credit for that joke at the time it is at least a joke sort of now that is an example of
00:47:23.040like there is a joke there you know lebron james 840 points a game kind of a joke and so that's
00:47:29.260an improvement for chapelle but it's it's also a joke that by the time chapelle landed on it had
00:47:33.480already been made by approximately every single conservative on social media a billion times.
00:47:39.780That exact joke of, if LeBron James is in the WNBA, all he has to do is pretend he's a woman,
00:47:44.200he's BWA, he'll score a thousand points a game. That precise joke. I mean, maybe not a billion,
00:47:50.760maybe a hundred million times it had been made. Yeah, that's a conservative estimate.
00:47:55.580And that's what part of what made it seem notable at the time. He's saying the thing
00:47:59.180that right-wingers have been saying, but that's also what makes it in retrospect, not very
00:48:02.660impressive and hardly a comedic revelation. The more important point, though, is that ever since
00:48:07.860the backlash he received after this brief foray into slaughtering leftist sacred cows, he's been
00:48:12.920trying to claw his way back into the good graces of the left, and that's why he's now going after
00:48:17.100Charlie Kirk. Now, if you ask Chappelle's defenders, they'll tell you that actually he's a highly
00:48:21.600principled comedian who walked away from a $50 million payday solely because he wasn't comfortable
00:48:26.760with how some white people were laughing at his humor. As the story goes, he was uncomfortable
00:48:31.120when a white person on set appeared to be laughing at his black stereotypes instead of laughing along
00:48:35.380with them. But the truth is probably that Chappelle was a deadbeat who walked off the job0.53
00:48:40.160because he couldn't hack it. Then he blamed his own laziness and incompetence on racist white0.99
00:48:44.080guys. According to the time when Chappelle left the show, it was producing, quote, a sketch about0.96
00:48:49.060magic pixies that embody stereotypes about the races. The black pixie played by Chappelle wears
00:48:53.700blackface and tries to convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch0.95
00:48:57.920was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at, but at the taping, one spectator, a
00:49:01.620white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he
00:49:06.320wondered if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing
00:49:10.520them. When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable, says Chappelle. As a matter of fact, that was the
00:49:15.100last thing I shot before I told myself I got to take an effing time out after this because my head
00:49:19.900almost exploded. Now, when you look back, it's funny that Chappelle became briefly a hero to the
00:49:25.480right? This is a guy who says he stopped doing his show because he doesn't want white people0.81
00:49:32.120laughing at his jokes. Imagine a white comedian complaining about black people0.99
00:49:37.720laughing at his jokes and then still having a career after that. You can't imagine it because0.62
00:49:44.300it would never happen. The point here isn't that we should be offended by the fact that Chappelle
00:49:48.680is a bitter anti-white hack the point is just that he is that's what he is he's he dropped0.94
00:49:56.000out of his show because he didn't want white people laughing at his jokes what else do you0.94
00:49:59.500call that to an extent you know uh that a lot of people probably didn't realize if they didn't
00:50:05.260follow chapelle's career that closely or ever you know read anything about the reason why he
00:50:09.380stopped doing his show 20 years ago this is what he is and um i know i certainly never read much
00:50:14.620about it because really who cares there is no reason to care now except as a way to put context
00:50:18.600on his Charlie Kirk comments, as the left insists that we do. Everyone is saying,
00:50:25.780what's the context? We need context. Well, here's the context. As you wish.
00:50:31.600Chappelle has always hated white people. Charlie was white. He was successful. He was conservative.0.98
00:50:36.540That's why Chappelle was happy to watch a young man and father of young children
00:50:40.220get shot through the neck. There's your context. So yes, contrary to what he told the white NPR
00:50:47.800lady. He is indeed malicious. He will celebrate your death as he celebrates the murder of Charlie0.69
00:50:52.740Kirk. But on the bright side, we can be sure of one thing, which is that regardless of how
00:50:58.840ascendant the left is right now, Dave Chappelle will not get the last laugh. That's because if
00:51:05.200this footage from Madison Square Garden is any indication, at this stage of his career, he's
00:51:10.100having a lot of trouble getting any laughs at all. Don't forget Confession comes out on Wednesday