Well that’s not quite what I meant. I’m not saying everything must be experienced in audio rather than textual but that you can’t grasp the full meaning of something without understanding the context within which it exists.
e.g. for sculpture and the visual arts I wouldn’t trust your opinion of a work you hadn’t seen and only know it through someone’s description of one part of it.
For a comedy routine the transcript itself won’t capture it properly and excerpts from that transcript even less so.
For a politician’s speech, it would also be preferential to hear it first hand as there may be nuances you miss in the written form but if you are going to criticise it then the very least you can do is to read the whole thing rather than criticising on the basis of selected sound-bites chosen for you by a (potentially biased) third party.
It remains a bananas view of how words work, and the fact that none of Chappelle’s defenders have even begun to advance an argument that the performance undercut the transphobic message means this is an evidence-free claim. It does not merit being taken seriously.
It really isn’t and pretty much everyone is this thread is telling you that in one form or another.
You cannot know what is actually meant without understanding the surrounding context.
You might be right and you might be wrong but clearly at the moment what you are is ignorant of the full situation. You can feel free to react in whatever way you choose but it holds very little weight.
One common thought is that punching up is funny and punching down is mean.
Is Caitlyn Jenner a punch up or a punch down? If the joke is about Caitlyn the celebrity, it’s a punch up, if it’s about transwomen really being men, it’s a punch down.
So, joking about Caitlyn winning WoY after being a woman for a month, I think that’s a punch up. It’s about her situation, her announcement, and the public’s reaction to it. Even if it glosses over the idea that she identified as a woman long before announcing it, it’s still about her.
Joking about that award being the same as BET giving an award to Eminem, that’s punching down. It’s not about her anymore, it’s about all transwomen.
Everyone is someone else’s “jerk”. The primary rule is to actually be clever and funny.
I don’t think there should be any absolute “protected classes” or "things you can’t joke about. Some people might say “you can never wear blackface” or “joking about rape is inappropriate”, but that’s bullshit. If that were true, you wouldn’t have Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder or Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd (George Carlin).
Now the trend seems to be “you can’t joke about transgendered people”. I haven’t seen anyone site specific jokes or routines Chappelle does that are “transphobic”. They just keep parroting “Chapelle is transphobic” as if it’s just a given fact that we should take for granted. Chapelle actually comments on this at length in his most recent special - That he made some jokes like 5 years ago and his critics just keep repeating the same “Chapelle is transphobic” talking points.
I guess my one critique of Chappelle is that he looks like he bulked up a bit in the years since his cable show. IIt makes him physically look more like a “bully”. I think you can get away with more when you look like a gangly geek.
Interesting. That’s not even close to the primary rule, as far as I’m concerned. The primary rule is to treat other people well and in such a way that people can generally lead the lives they want to lead with dignity.
Everyone is someone else’s “funny.” Being funny is a small part of what a person should try to do; and if the choice is to be funny or to avoid cruelty, choose the latter.
In your opinion, is classic literature that contains racist views (Mark Twain, for example) undercut by the racism expressed within to the extent that you would advise your students not to read it? Is there no view you can offer a student that would help him or her understand and appreciate the work while also learning to contextualize the flaws?
I just directly told you that what matters is not hearing something, but rather experiencing the full context of the item in question, which may (in the case of a comedic routine) require you to hear it.
What is it about my point that is “ridiculous” and why?
You know who else is very funny? Tig Notaro. I think she’s funnier than Dave Chappelle and she never makes fun of anybody in the way that Chappelle does. Conclusion: We should only have one type of humor.
Dave is hilarious most of the time. I haven’t seen the latest special but from previous ones he was basically saying that he doesn’t identify with trans people, but he tries to sympathize.
Although I believe he should be able to say what he wants IMO he should quit pushing the trans debate because it’s distracting from his otherwise excellent material and stories. If he is honestly not anti-trans and just trying to understand he should still stop trying to understand publicly because, like Chappelle’s Show, his words can reinforce stereotypes rather than satirize them.
Treating people “well” and with “dignity” in comedy covers a massive amount of ground for which hard and fast rules are almost impossible to agree on.
I know of a comedian who mercilessly ripped the piss out of a cancer patient in the front row, was that dignified? Others in the crowd were open-mouthed in shock but the patient in question loved it, the “dignity” in their case was being treated to the same degree of comedic attention as everyone around them. To exclude them would have been far more cruel.
After the show the comedian was approached by members of the crowd who were outraged and also by other people with cancer who specifically wished he had done the same to them.
It is a particular form of pernicious soft bigotry to claim, on the behalf of certain groups, that they are exempt from comedic targeting.
Quite often in the transgender discussions, issues of mental stability and suicide are often brought up to show how important it is for society to recognize the person as their chosen gender. It could be that transgender people are more mentally fragile and criticism is magnified. As a contrast, I don’t recall discussions about racism having the same argument that racism needs to be removed because [insert race] have a higher suicide risk. So it could be that transgender should just be a verboten topic in comedy because of the increased risk of suicide.
Is Chappelle doing his best version of a Blazing Saddles-esque satire on bigotry ?
Idunno. Maybe.
But it would have been extremely easy to rip apart Blazing Saddles (and plenty did, and probably still do) and conclude that it was little more than a vile screed that highlighted and promoted every version of intolerance imaginable.
In terms of Blazing Saddles, context was absolutely everything.
As I said on the other Chappelle thread, I got a lot of context from watching the show – enough to not feel so absolutist about him or the show’s component parts.