Dave Chappelle Is Reportedly Still Making Transphobic Jokes
While the social media community is still seething following the ignorant comments made by comedian Lil' Duval about the transgender community, it seemed as that narrative where the marginalized group is exploited had passed.
That's not quite the case, however, as this time, A-list comic Dave Chappelle is the latest public figure to speak insensitively about the transgender population in one of his recent sets.
According to Jesse David Fox at Vulture, the comedian made a few disparaging jokes during the kickoff of his 16-show residency at Radio City Music Hall.
"For about the first 20 minutes of his set, Chappelle almost exclusively talked about trans issues," Fox wrote, before highlighting specific points throughout the set where he picked trans folks apart.
"He started by talking about how he was 'shocked!' by Trump's ban on transgender officers in the military, because he didn't realize there were any trans people in the military," he wrote. "'Sounds like a secret weapon to me,' he continued. 'If I was in ISIS in the trenches fighting against the United States and all of the sudden I see a man with a beard and big D-cups titties just rushing my foxhole and s**t, I'd be horrified."
Things seemed to take a turn for what was hopefully the best when Chappelle recalled a time when he received a fan letter urging him to cut back on the trans jokes. However, he only used that opportunity to poke fun at the community once more.
"Later, he told a story about receiving a fan letter that derided his trans jokes, to which he replied, 'A weird thing happened to me in this moment — it honestly made me feel bad that I made somebody else feel bad,'" he said. "That was, however, just misdirection for another series of trans jokes."
A litter further along in the set, he tried to explain his own gripes with "all this talk about how they feel inside," before making a point that America has never cared about how anyone feels.
"Since when has America given a f**k about how anyone feels inside?" he said.
He concluded his point by adding the concept of race into the mix: "He ended by arguing that sometimes he thinks 'the only reason all of us are talking about transgenders is because white men want to do it. If it was just Blacks and Mexicans like, 'Hey, y'all, we feel like girls inside,' they'd be like, 'Shut up, n****r, no one asked how you felt.'"
Chappelle has not addressed the controversy surrounding the set.
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