Dave Chappelle is in hot water again. During the course of his fresh Netflix comedy special, he cracked several jokes about transgender ideology. As a result, he is now the object of near-universal condemnation in the establishment media for lampooning LGBTQ orthodoxy.
The first gag involved the retelling of a story about meeting fellow comic Jim Carrey, who portrayed Andy Kaufman in the 1999 movie Man on the Moon. “I was very disappointed because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey and I had to pretend he was Andy Kaufman all afternoon,” explained Chappelle. Apparently, Carrey remained in character during their meeting because it took place on the movie’s set. “It was clearly Jim Carrey. I could look at him and clearly see it was Jim Carrey. I say all that to say … that’s how trans people make me feel.”
After taking a few pokes at former Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn, Chappelle made another joke about people who support transgender ideology. The set-up for that gag involved Chappelle explaining how he’s trying to mend fences with the LGBTQ community by writing a stage play. “It’s about a black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n*****. It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play she dies of loneliness because white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. It’s sad.”
This is what comics do; they skewer people all the time. They observe the world around them and make jokes about it, often at the expense of others. That includes jokes about middle-aged, white, heterosexual, male Christians. As a MAWHMC myself, some gags make me laugh; others not so much. In the comedian’s world, we’re all fair game for occasional ribbing.
Yet the fallacy of transgender ideology is not to be the subject of jokes, so says the popular culture. Doing so is either hateful or transphobic or promoting violence or maybe all three. One review of the special by the AV Club complains that Chappelle's performance is “an attempt at offending, upsetting, and endangering the lives of marginalized people for his amusement.”
But the truth is something more. Chappelle’s critics are less upset by his jokes than the response to them. The punchline for his Jim Carrey gag drew uproarious, sustained laughter and applause from the audience. The crowd doubled over laughing at the joke about white liberals not knowing how to talk to a black transgender woman.
Far worse than a theater filled with people howling at a comic’s sense of humor is the universe of people who share in their laughter. For nearly a week, Chappelle’s special was the #1 show on Netflix, which has more than 247 million subscribers. It slipped to #2 by the time I edited this column on Friday afternoon. That’s a problem for LGBTQ militants.
Transgender ideologues are indeed angry with Chappelle, but they are far more angry that millions of Americans are laughing at the sophistry of their political agenda. Contrasted with the mercifully small percentage of people whose chromosomal sex does not match their anatomical sex, transgender ideology promotes what the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes as delusions, a leading symptom of various psychotic disorders.
For the record, the DSM-5 defines delusions as “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.” That pretty much describes any man who insists he’s a woman even though his genetics, anatomy, physiology and endocrine system contradict his belief. This affliction can be so severe that some sufferers become furious when people don’t share their delusions.
But it gets worse. Among some LGBTQ allies, the ideological transgender delusion metastasizes into an adjacent delusion; that simply knowing science constitutes hate in spite of conflicting evidence that it does not. If people simply walked around pretending to be something they’re not, while otherwise minding their own business, that would be fine. But yelling at people to agree with a narcissistic, delusional worldview is neither appreciated nor effective in changing hearts and minds.
The anger of LGBTQ ideologues doesn’t seem to be helping their cause. Rather than convincing normal people that they must apologize for spreading hate and humbly admit the error of their ways, their rage is being met with increasing derision. Let’s face it, it takes a lot of derision to make Chappelle’s special the most watched program on a platform with nearly a quarter billion viewers.
What Dave Chappelle has done is illustrate Rule 5 of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: “Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It's hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.” True to Alinsky’s theory, LGBTQ ideologues are infuriated with Chappelle and America’s reaction to his jokes. More people are wising up to the lies of transgender ideology, so buckle-up for more unbridled anger in the days ahead.