It was obvious from the first ten minutes that Dave has embraced the regressive tone of an aging white man, which I'd hoped was just a passing phase in his prior Netfix specials. I feel like I'm watching the sad decline of a once great artist.
It's probably more like he's from a particular point in time where comedians felt like
the entire world needed to be taken down a peg. Where things like South Park were seen as extremely smart and relevant. I was sort of a part of that time when I was young. I was raised into it. The surface feeling was this: breaking everything down was fun because everyone else was self-important and full of shit. Why did we really do it, though?
Was it because we were living too long in relative peace? Or the illusion of relative peace, maybe. As if it's hard to care about
anyone if you think everything is a lie.
Even so, if pressed, the defense was generally "it's just comedy, don't take it so seriously." Okay, but where's all that coming from? That feeling? That need? What part of your mind are your words actually revealing?
Why did George Carlin look at disasters and think, "I should joke that I find this hilarious and amazing"? As cheesy and corny as they seemed to many then, why did people
actually make fun of Captain Planet and Arbor Day and all that?
When Dave Chapelle jokes he would rape Macaulay Culkin first, who is it for? The average guy? Is he saying, "these stories put a strain on you, society says they should make you feel uncomfortable. I know you hate feeling this way, or feeling like there's pressure to, so come to me. I'll tear its importance down and make you laugh along with others. By accepting the deconstruction of taboos alongside hundreds or thousands of people in a crowd, I'll let you build the unspoken social permission to dismiss the pain of the world. Even enjoy it. Because the alternative is a drag."
Perhaps it's a mistake to think it's all jaded altruism. It could be selfish. As if the one who can't possibly forget all this is the comedian, who makes other people laugh so he can have the space to laugh too. That's why failure to get laughs feels so much like death, because the comedian feels like they're on death row. The universe feels hollow and terrifying, and the person has torn out some desperate part of themselves to show to a crowd and say, "On the top I seem cool, but look at how this shit actually eats me up, please understand, please make it alright, please help me," and a silent hall means there's nowhere to escape their own thoughts.
Maybe this breed of comedians succeeded en masse at a time when we were all becoming cognizant of how many bad things there were -- as we were connecting more with the world -- and at first wanted edgy humor to cope, to have all this shit in the world stop screaming in our ears that "
you should give a damn." That way we could properly ignore them, focus on our own lives like always, and pretend our world would spin on. Maybe as our world actually spins on, it's getting harder and harder to want fantasy when we see where effort to preserve the status quo leads.
Or maybe Dave Chapelle is just a douche.
Christ, I'm talking out of my ass! I'm probably coming at this from a naive angle. "Baby's First Philosophy Regarding Comedy."
But I can't stop feeling that discussing this is right. What is one to do when the once-funny feels wrong?
