After having a discussion with some friends about what Mr Chappelle was trying to say in his special, I figured I’d give the entire thing a good look. I’d already seen the necessary clips from various blogs to know what the general idea was, especially in light of his body of work. This special seems tailor made for outrage with small snippets that could be easily extracted to feed the outrage machine’s insatiable appetite for something, anything, to be absolutely disgusted with. It’s obvious that this special was a trap, one that the idiots fell for, hook like and sinker. On the face of it, Chappelle is mocking lgbqt peoples, and you’d sure be able to extract some racist or bigoted statements from the special, but the outrage only works if you don’t have intellectual honesty and are acting in bad faith, and most importantly, only present textual representations of what he says, instead of a/v clips, or even heaven forbid, present it as a total picture.
If you were outraged by this? You’re a fool that fell for a clever intellectual and social trap that Netflix and Chappelle laid out for you. Embarrassed by being called a fool? Don’t want to be made the fool of? Good! That’s the first step to being better tomorrow than you were yesterday, and after all, isn’t that what we should all be striving for?
