Originally I told myself I wasn’t going to write on this but the more I thought about it I couldn’t help myself.
***SPOILERS BELOW***
Trust that I marked my calendar and set my timer when we got word last week that a new Chappelle special on Netflix was incoming. He’s the GOAT™ 🐐, in my opinion and many others at least. It appears to be the final installment of his six special deal with the streaming service and according to him it will be his last for awhile 😢.
I’ve watched it…and it hurts to me say, it wasn’t my favorite. To be honest, it’s not particularly close. I can’t say it’s bad because it’s art and that’s subjective. Also, being the 🐐means that we’re really only holding him to his standard of production. For anyone else this might’ve been their magnum opus but alas.
I’m not really here to get into the specific jokes or give much of a review, just some quick thoughts on why I may have been slightly let down. My main issue with “The Closer” was that it just seemed to be a rehash of his last couple of specials. I get that he was trying to wrap up this series and he wanted to revisit topics from before, but they just didn’t come out as funny as when he said it the first time.
The special started off with a bunch of jokes that just seemed like they were meant to be offensive. Don’t get me wrong, I love dark humor and comedy that can be interpreted as mean, but this just seemed sub-par in comparison to his previous works. Now I’m immature so quite a few got me to break but even then it just didn’t feel as funny as “Sticks & Stones”.
His continued infatuation with the LGBTQ jokes in this special was the real head scratcher. Overall it just seems like he’s determined to beat a dead horse by using that community to make his overarching point about the dynamic between them and black male entertainers getting “canceled” for their jokes about them. We get it Dave. Cancel culture is annoying but I doubt continuing to antagonize them is going to stop the pushback against your comedy. Now I’ll say the last 10-15 minutes when he was talking about his friend, Daphne, to express his point offered more compelling material, but overall I just wanted to yell at him through the TV to drop the issue, which according to him he will.
There’s still some good quips in here so if you like Chappelle definitely watch it, considering we don’t know how long he’ll be dormant. At the end of the day, he’s still the best to do it, in my eyes, and I hope it’s sooner than later that we get to see him get back to the more witty comedy we were accustomed to rather than the unnecessary agendas as of recent.
Just 'Cause Concepts 
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