“I guess apparently they had made a pledge to the public at large that they would make their club a safe space for all people, and that they would ban anything they deemed transphobic,” Chappelle reacted on his “The Midnight Miracle” podcast at the time. “This is a wild stance for an artistic venue to take, especially one that’s historically a punk rock venue.”
This guy doesn’t understand any subculture, does he? The punks are, historically, very anti-fascist, and the ones I know are also some of the strongest queer allies I’ve ever met. And this guy is surprised that they didn’t want his bigotry masquerading as humour.
Humor doesn’t HAVE TO punch down. There can be good LGBTQ+ jokes that are inclusive and sensitive, and, yes, actually funny while including the community and everyone in the humor without being hurtful.
It takes skill and craft to create them, and to deliver them, but, yes, they can exist.
Edit: a big part of comedy is commenting on things one observes. And there is lots to observe and comment upon with queer culture. The key is to comment and observe without being a bigot. Sooo… with a queer eye, that’s fertile ground, and one can do much with that.
If he talked to that “trans friend” he definitely has, maybe he could find out what being trans is actually like and incorporate meaningful material about it. But no, he’s just another bigoted rich asshole now. All he can see is his own “struggles” and that the world is “out to get him”.
*I was morbidly curious and looked up the transcript of his bit about her ('cause fuck listening to him) and wow, how does he think that is remotely supportive? He says the “magic” words (“trans women are women”), then spends the rest of the bit critiquing how well she passed, comparing her genitals to imitation meat, and lauding her for taking his and other people’s abuse “well”. Her only value seemed to be what she could provide to him. Also found out she committed suicide two years prior, so he’s using a person as a shield/punching bag that can’t even speak for herself. What a classless fucking move.
I think one of Dave’s mistakes is in thinking he didn’t have any “down.” His humor is brilliant and searing when it comes to being black. He’s done skits where he’s a slave. He sees himself as the historical victim of the ages and never imagined that anyone could take what he says as coming from above. Classic privilege blindness, and a great illustration of what that means intersectionally.
But also, he needs to make jokes period. I saw his last special. If there were any punchlines following his ranting about the mean trans people bullying him online, I totally missed them.
Right? I finished it sincerely wondering if it was intended to be comedy or not. There wasn’t a single coherent joke in ninety minutes. Unless I was supposed to laugh that he bought a fire station and turned it into a club?
I think that is what made Trump decide to highjack the fascist movement in American that had been being cultivated for years. Who knows how ‘16 would’ve gone with Paul Ryan or whoever they trotted out against Hilary
Assuming you are asking genuinely, here’s an answer.
Q wasn’t created as a result of V’s(or P’s) intolerance, it’s a specialisation of a larger group, P.
P and Q aren’t mutually exclusive, you can be both.
V can and do enjoy both P and it’s subgenre/offshoot Q.
If you don’t understand in general why larger social groups might sometimes give rise to more specilaised subgroups or offshoots (for reasons other than exclusion) then any answer you receive is not going to make sense to you.
Incidentally, the same explanation works for the cooking show example, as it’s the same basic premise.
I’m not the person who replied to you but I’m fairly confident that person was mimicking your phrasing with an example they thought was simpler for you to understand, in order for you to see how it sounded incorrect.
It seems you didn’t get the context of that, which is probably why it seemed like an odd reply.
in contextual translation:
If television viewers were accepting of cooking then why did they have to create a subgenre of cooking shows?
becomes
In the same way that cooking shows exist as a sub-genre of TV shows in general without requiring broadcasters to have first banned cooking on TV , queercore can exist without requiring punk to have first been intolerant of it’s LGBTQIA+ members.
After not having a great time towards the end of highschool, I ended up spending most of my free time.between classes, in classes, and lunch, etc with the punk kids and the potheads. And they were some of the nicest and coolest fucking kids I’ve ever met. Super glad I had that experience because it definitely broke that propaganda fueled view I had of those two groups, for when i entered adulthood.
Kind of similar for me, except that even the punk people found me too weird/boring/annoying. They were nice about it but definitely not interested in spending time with me, just taking pity on me.
Aww, haha.
I guess I can’t really help, but I appreciate you. :p
Also, I was looking at your comment history because I was curious what kind of person you were. That guy activating his yugioh trap card and calling you a pedophile because you flippantly said 12-years and not 19 or whatever he wanted is so fucking funny. It didn’t even make sense. That was like watching a bird glide into a glass window.
Haha, yep, I got a lot of joy from that, too. Guy must’ve never heard of when puberty starts and what it’s for.
Thanks for the kind words :) I’m alright now, but that teenager time was definitely quite wild/painful for me. I’m glad to have met so many amazing humans and appreciate people like you, too.
I’m so sick of people trying to hide hate speech behind free speech, behind tolerance, behind pluralism. It’s hate. It’s hate. It doesn’t need to be protected and included. This is very old news. All they do by quibbling about it is broadcast to the world that their intellect is about 100 years behind the rest of us. Fuck you, Dave.
Wrong. Hate speech is deplorable, but it’s not up to the state to decide good or bad speech. How long ago was it that queer advocacy would have been seen as bad speech by the government? I would assume that drag shows were not illegal thanks to the protections afforded it by freedom of speech, during times when the government and the people would have been more than willing to ban them. Would a government attempt to flag atheism as hate speech if enough evangelical protestants held office?Speech is speech (hate, good, bad, whatever) and the government should not be able to limit it whatsoever.
If you dont like dave, dont spend any money with him or anyone/any business that supports him.
As a counterpoint laws around hate speech do and have existed in Canada since 1970 and they are specific. We as a country also are more progressive than the states.
The way it works interfaces with the idea that some speech can call for violence or genocide against other geoups and can be liable to be charged under law UNDER SPECIFIC CONDITIONS.
1 - It has to be public - ie one is playing to a crowd. This covers things like making speeches over a microphone, or broadcasting propaganda through print or recording. This law does not apply to private speech. Amongst your peers in a social setting you can do or say whatever you like.
2 - It must regard the call for killing members of an identifiable group (ones outlined in the charter of Rights and Freedoms), or inflicting conditions of life on a group which are calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group.
3 - It holds other protections- Laws that cover other rights like religion do allow religious views to be expressed or ones that pretain to a legitimate concern of public welfare. These however require citations from legitimate sources. If you are quoting a true historical event or a scientifically proven fact in your speech that actually happened and is documented by historians or scientists - there are protections. If what you are saying is provably untrue then the law takes into account a certain level of flexibility to sentencing based on a good faith understanding that a certain level of deviance from fact can be present as a matter of someone being ignorant.
4 - Like all laws it is a sliding scale. Like you can call the police for someone being a public nuisance by yelling their heads off at 3am - Most of the time this doesn’t end in so much as a fine. In a non broadcast recording setting the cops basically tell the person to stop and only if they persist can they be arrested and even then they might not be charged. Nobody really has seen prison time under this law. Just fines.
A recent amendment to the law specifying holocaust denial has seen people sent to prison and even then it has only shut down those doing it persistently online because that specific rhetoric is historically documented as coming from a movement with clear intent to promote genocide.
The imagining of laws as not being capable of having balance with civil rights activism is a sham and it ultimately hurts minorities. Advocating for better rights or social acceptance cannot be punishable under these laws. Heck advocating for the decriminalization of hate speech is protected speech because there are laws REGARDING protected speech. If someone is calling to kill or inlict utter undeniable misery then they can do it without the benefit of a megaphone. It won’t stop all speech, and it shouldn’t, but if someone is trying to incite actual violence by documenting themselves advocating for actual demonstatable violence then society can have tools to make the cost of that higher.
However - Americans have an entirely different situation. Canada does not have private prisons that provide more pressure to incarcerate more people. We do not elect judges and the only way you can become one is to be a lawyer in good standing for over 8 years. Our documents regarding rights and freedoms is in modern language and not archaic text that requires historical scholarship to contextualize and deconstruct. There is no doctrine in Canadian law to protect the anachronistic interests of long dead founders of the country.
Law in America is much easier to use as tools of oppression. Your paranoia is not unfounded but it is a product of legally speaking coming from a broken home. Laws can be narrow and specific scalpels and not hammers. If they are made in the spirit of protection from violence and narrowed to that purpose they can be good. The rallying cry of “Freedom of speech” is already not absolute and has reasonable limits. It can and does have reasonable limits and those limits are protective of truth and the bodily safety of your fellow citizens who deserve to not be attacked and killed by other citizens radicalized by rhetoric made into weapons.
I agree the state should not infringe speech. You are free to blow more word count than is actually in the First Amendment on reminding us that it exists, and you did. I get it.
But we can hold the belief that the state should stay out of it even while we personally shit on assholes spewing hate and crying “free speech” when they get a reaction to it. They have free speech - they cry about it because they want it to be guaranteed bandwidth / freedom from consequences. Fuck them and fuck that.
I genuinely get how it can be a fine line, but people are at too much risk to allow poisonous words to go too far. We saw how powerful such lies can be in 2025, from people who literally regard the entire trans movement as terrorism.
Nazis can be allowed to state any thought that falls under basic logical/philosophic debate. That, to their minds, doesn’t go very far. Once it becomes any form of grouping by identity, by circumstances of birth, by sexuality, it’s just their incessant, generations-old obsession with hatred and is useless for any and all human discussion of progress. There is no grace in protecting it.
Thank you! A friend tried that shit with me. “Why are you so against this, you hang out with racist skinheads!”… Face-palm. Amazing how one movie painted a whole anti racist subculture into boneheads. There are very few racist skinheads, FYI. It’s a very working class pro Unity subculture. IT WAS JUST A MOVIE!
It is this one. The most popular, and the basis for the rest. Was this stuff happening? did it happen? Sure, but few and far between. Once AHX gained popularity, all of a sudden every skinhead is a nazi skin. When, in reality, it is a small, problematic number in a sea of mostly SHARPS (skinheads against racial prejudice).
That’s the first thing that jumped out to me as well. He doesn’t understand punk rock or punks.
By Chappelle standard it’s perfectly okay to have a former pedophile doing stand-up at this venue. Now, who in the right mind would allow that? Other than you know who lol
This guy doesn’t understand any subculture, does he? The punks are, historically, very anti-fascist, and the ones I know are also some of the strongest queer allies I’ve ever met. And this guy is surprised that they didn’t want his bigotry masquerading as humour.
And it’s not like you can’t make jokes involving trans people, just don’t make jokes at the expense of trans people.
Humour doesn’t punch down. That’s just bullying.
Humor doesn’t HAVE TO punch down. There can be good LGBTQ+ jokes that are inclusive and sensitive, and, yes, actually funny while including the community and everyone in the humor without being hurtful.
It takes skill and craft to create them, and to deliver them, but, yes, they can exist.
Edit: a big part of comedy is commenting on things one observes. And there is lots to observe and comment upon with queer culture. The key is to comment and observe without being a bigot. Sooo… with a queer eye, that’s fertile ground, and one can do much with that.
If he talked to that “trans friend” he definitely has, maybe he could find out what being trans is actually like and incorporate meaningful material about it. But no, he’s just another bigoted rich asshole now. All he can see is his own “struggles” and that the world is “out to get him”.
*I was morbidly curious and looked up the transcript of his bit about her ('cause fuck listening to him) and wow, how does he think that is remotely supportive? He says the “magic” words (“trans women are women”), then spends the rest of the bit critiquing how well she passed, comparing her genitals to imitation meat, and lauding her for taking his and other people’s abuse “well”. Her only value seemed to be what she could provide to him. Also found out she committed suicide two years prior, so he’s using a person as a shield/punching bag that can’t even speak for herself. What a classless fucking move.
This is a dude who’s definitely been to a drag show. So he has heard queer humor. But he didn’t learn anything from it. That’s the problem.
I think one of Dave’s mistakes is in thinking he didn’t have any “down.” His humor is brilliant and searing when it comes to being black. He’s done skits where he’s a slave. He sees himself as the historical victim of the ages and never imagined that anyone could take what he says as coming from above. Classic privilege blindness, and a great illustration of what that means intersectionally.
I feel like this punching model is like Newtonian physics. We do have relativity now, but you gotta take a higher-level class for that one.
Waka waka
But also, he needs to make jokes period. I saw his last special. If there were any punchlines following his ranting about the mean trans people bullying him online, I totally missed them.
Right? I finished it sincerely wondering if it was intended to be comedy or not. There wasn’t a single coherent joke in ninety minutes. Unless I was supposed to laugh that he bought a fire station and turned it into a club?
The best comedians can roast a president right to his face. The best presidents can hear the roast and laugh at it.
I’m still convinced that Obama roasting Trump to his face at the WHCD in 2011 changed the course of history
I think that is what made Trump decide to highjack the fascist movement in American that had been being cultivated for years. Who knows how ‘16 would’ve gone with Paul Ryan or whoever they trotted out against Hilary
The punks
wereare extremely LGBTQ+ acceptant, even as far back as the 60s and 70sQueercore
That’s part of what
mademakes them so fucking hot… all that leather? Are you kidding me?🤯 I was today years old when I learned that…
If punk was “extremely LGBTQ+ acceptant”, then they did they have to create an offshoot? 🤔
I don’t think you understand punk
There’s no “have to” about it
I don’t, which is why I posted the question.
edit: I don’t understand punk, to be clear.
If television viewers were accepting of cooking then why did they have to create a subgenre of cooking shows?
That… doesn’t make sense. Viewers don’t make new shows.
Ok. Your question also didn’t make sense.
Punk is genre P LGBTQ+ are viewers V Queercore is subgenre Q
I said:
P accepts V V creates Q If P accepts/includes V why V create separate Q?
TV viewers are V Cooking show is P Cooking show subgenre is Q
You said:
V accepts P then why did V create Q
How should your response make sense to what I’ve said, logically speaking?
Assuming you are asking genuinely, here’s an answer.
Q wasn’t created as a result of V’s(or P’s) intolerance, it’s a specialisation of a larger group, P.
P and Q aren’t mutually exclusive, you can be both.
V can and do enjoy both P and it’s subgenre/offshoot Q.
If you don’t understand in general why larger social groups might sometimes give rise to more specilaised subgroups or offshoots (for reasons other than exclusion) then any answer you receive is not going to make sense to you.
Incidentally, the same explanation works for the cooking show example, as it’s the same basic premise.
I’m not the person who replied to you but I’m fairly confident that person was mimicking your phrasing with an example they thought was simpler for you to understand, in order for you to see how it sounded incorrect.
It seems you didn’t get the context of that, which is probably why it seemed like an odd reply.
in contextual translation:
becomes
Stop it with your relentless “logic”!
Hahaha. It was a stretch to be sure. The point is one doesn’t need to be exclusive of the other.
Shame on you for not recognizing a famous line from Futurama! 😛
Man, I’m old and too uncool for Lemmy.
sorry, I guess I’m also too old to make a good joke ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After not having a great time towards the end of highschool, I ended up spending most of my free time.between classes, in classes, and lunch, etc with the punk kids and the potheads. And they were some of the nicest and coolest fucking kids I’ve ever met. Super glad I had that experience because it definitely broke that propaganda fueled view I had of those two groups, for when i entered adulthood.
Kind of similar for me, except that even the punk people found me too weird/boring/annoying. They were nice about it but definitely not interested in spending time with me, just taking pity on me.
Aww, haha.
I guess I can’t really help, but I appreciate you. :p
Also, I was looking at your comment history because I was curious what kind of person you were. That guy activating his yugioh trap card and calling you a pedophile because you flippantly said 12-years and not 19 or whatever he wanted is so fucking funny. It didn’t even make sense. That was like watching a bird glide into a glass window.
Haha, yep, I got a lot of joy from that, too. Guy must’ve never heard of when puberty starts and what it’s for.
Thanks for the kind words :) I’m alright now, but that teenager time was definitely quite wild/painful for me. I’m glad to have met so many amazing humans and appreciate people like you, too.
There’s propaganda against punks? I mean, I know the mild “troublemakers” label most get, but that generally applies to teens/YA in general.
Yeah, the trouble maker part. Or people that are violent, etc. Going to punk music shows with mosh pits, etc…
I’m so sick of people trying to hide hate speech behind free speech, behind tolerance, behind pluralism. It’s hate. It’s hate. It doesn’t need to be protected and included. This is very old news. All they do by quibbling about it is broadcast to the world that their intellect is about 100 years behind the rest of us. Fuck you, Dave.
Wrong. Hate speech is deplorable, but it’s not up to the state to decide good or bad speech. How long ago was it that queer advocacy would have been seen as bad speech by the government? I would assume that drag shows were not illegal thanks to the protections afforded it by freedom of speech, during times when the government and the people would have been more than willing to ban them. Would a government attempt to flag atheism as hate speech if enough evangelical protestants held office?Speech is speech (hate, good, bad, whatever) and the government should not be able to limit it whatsoever.
If you dont like dave, dont spend any money with him or anyone/any business that supports him.
As a counterpoint laws around hate speech do and have existed in Canada since 1970 and they are specific. We as a country also are more progressive than the states.
The way it works interfaces with the idea that some speech can call for violence or genocide against other geoups and can be liable to be charged under law UNDER SPECIFIC CONDITIONS.
1 - It has to be public - ie one is playing to a crowd. This covers things like making speeches over a microphone, or broadcasting propaganda through print or recording. This law does not apply to private speech. Amongst your peers in a social setting you can do or say whatever you like.
2 - It must regard the call for killing members of an identifiable group (ones outlined in the charter of Rights and Freedoms), or inflicting conditions of life on a group which are calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group.
3 - It holds other protections- Laws that cover other rights like religion do allow religious views to be expressed or ones that pretain to a legitimate concern of public welfare. These however require citations from legitimate sources. If you are quoting a true historical event or a scientifically proven fact in your speech that actually happened and is documented by historians or scientists - there are protections. If what you are saying is provably untrue then the law takes into account a certain level of flexibility to sentencing based on a good faith understanding that a certain level of deviance from fact can be present as a matter of someone being ignorant.
4 - Like all laws it is a sliding scale. Like you can call the police for someone being a public nuisance by yelling their heads off at 3am - Most of the time this doesn’t end in so much as a fine. In a non broadcast recording setting the cops basically tell the person to stop and only if they persist can they be arrested and even then they might not be charged. Nobody really has seen prison time under this law. Just fines.
A recent amendment to the law specifying holocaust denial has seen people sent to prison and even then it has only shut down those doing it persistently online because that specific rhetoric is historically documented as coming from a movement with clear intent to promote genocide.
The imagining of laws as not being capable of having balance with civil rights activism is a sham and it ultimately hurts minorities. Advocating for better rights or social acceptance cannot be punishable under these laws. Heck advocating for the decriminalization of hate speech is protected speech because there are laws REGARDING protected speech. If someone is calling to kill or inlict utter undeniable misery then they can do it without the benefit of a megaphone. It won’t stop all speech, and it shouldn’t, but if someone is trying to incite actual violence by documenting themselves advocating for actual demonstatable violence then society can have tools to make the cost of that higher.
However - Americans have an entirely different situation. Canada does not have private prisons that provide more pressure to incarcerate more people. We do not elect judges and the only way you can become one is to be a lawyer in good standing for over 8 years. Our documents regarding rights and freedoms is in modern language and not archaic text that requires historical scholarship to contextualize and deconstruct. There is no doctrine in Canadian law to protect the anachronistic interests of long dead founders of the country.
Law in America is much easier to use as tools of oppression. Your paranoia is not unfounded but it is a product of legally speaking coming from a broken home. Laws can be narrow and specific scalpels and not hammers. If they are made in the spirit of protection from violence and narrowed to that purpose they can be good. The rallying cry of “Freedom of speech” is already not absolute and has reasonable limits. It can and does have reasonable limits and those limits are protective of truth and the bodily safety of your fellow citizens who deserve to not be attacked and killed by other citizens radicalized by rhetoric made into weapons.
Keep your mind open.
I agree the state should not infringe speech. You are free to blow more word count than is actually in the First Amendment on reminding us that it exists, and you did. I get it.
But we can hold the belief that the state should stay out of it even while we personally shit on assholes spewing hate and crying “free speech” when they get a reaction to it. They have free speech - they cry about it because they want it to be guaranteed bandwidth / freedom from consequences. Fuck them and fuck that.
Sorry about that. I just assumed you were dumb and irrational because of your take. My bad.
I had a word or two in there that left room open for that. I hope I have clarified.
I genuinely get how it can be a fine line, but people are at too much risk to allow poisonous words to go too far. We saw how powerful such lies can be in 2025, from people who literally regard the entire trans movement as terrorism.
Nazis can be allowed to state any thought that falls under basic logical/philosophic debate. That, to their minds, doesn’t go very far. Once it becomes any form of grouping by identity, by circumstances of birth, by sexuality, it’s just their incessant, generations-old obsession with hatred and is useless for any and all human discussion of progress. There is no grace in protecting it.
Thank you! A friend tried that shit with me. “Why are you so against this, you hang out with racist skinheads!”… Face-palm. Amazing how one movie painted a whole anti racist subculture into boneheads. There are very few racist skinheads, FYI. It’s a very working class pro Unity subculture. IT WAS JUST A MOVIE!
Which movie are you referring to?
I’m going to assume American History X. Though it’s certainly not the only movie to depict the neo-Nazi subculture, it’s probably the most well know.
It is this one. The most popular, and the basis for the rest. Was this stuff happening? did it happen? Sure, but few and far between. Once AHX gained popularity, all of a sudden every skinhead is a nazi skin. When, in reality, it is a small, problematic number in a sea of mostly SHARPS (skinheads against racial prejudice).
Wild guess because I like guessing: American history x
That’s the first thing that jumped out to me as well. He doesn’t understand punk rock or punks.
By Chappelle standard it’s perfectly okay to have a former pedophile doing stand-up at this venue. Now, who in the right mind would allow that? Other than you know who lol
Yes. And there were a lot of Nazi punks too.
Oh yeah punks would never take a punch for or be outcast for hanging out with trans people, Dave definitely knows his history.