A warm roar enveloped Dave Chappelle as he took the stage in Toronto on New Year’s Day. These people clearly adore Dave Chappelle.
It’s not hard to see why. Chappelle is a gifted raconteur, speaking with a casual aplomb while weaving interesting stories laced with gags and insight. He moves effortlessly between topics, often circling back to twist an earlier joke in a way that ties the whole thing together. It’s classic comedy and he’s a master.
I can’t recall a lot of the show (should’a taken notes) but a few things stick out:
DC opened with a stab at the taboo on handicapped jokes, feigning a gimpy arm. It was tasteless, provocative but gentle somehow. DC is able to simultaneously express compassion and kindness while also poking fun. Few comedians today are able to do that and increasingly, few are willing to risk a scolding by the righteousness signallers. A good example was a rant later in the show in which pretty much everybody, of every stripe and colour, got referred to with the nword. Spread it around liberally enough with a generous intention and a word like that loses the hate in it.
Another classic topic for comedy is the personal relationship. The secret to a successful marriage, DC asked? “I cheat.” For which he gave no real evidence but did deliver some funny scenarios, like unlocking his wife’s phone, and she doing the same to him, by mimicking the others facial features, she Asian, him Black. Her lack of jealousy despite the evidence and his jealousy/suspicion despite the lack of evidence of any cheating on her part was totally endearing.
In response to his wife’s concern about their family’s future if something were to happen to DC, he told his wife about a safety deposit box that will “take care of everything.” She checked it out and found only a notebook. “Tell those jokes just the way I wrote them and you’ll be fine,” he said.
There was some audience interaction, the usual making fun of ethnicity/nationality, generations X, Y (millennials), and Z, or just how people look. As a boomer, I felt a bit left out, but then, we were a small minority of the audience. It was a very mixed, balanced crowd I’d say, and a gay friend of mine said some of his friends went.
A long bit about Chuck Berry’s sexual exploits, as seen by DC on “Pornhub”, while masturbating, was designed to shock because there was hardly a funny line in it. It went on an on, just getting more and more gross until finally it ended, with a fart. A fart joke? Really Dave? Are we 12?
As the show wore on, DC prowled the stage, rambling around, hunched over like he was about to fall down from being so amused by his own jokes. It’s great when comedians laugh at their own jokes, it breaks the fourth wall between them and the audience but for DC it seemed a bit rehearsed.
I like fashion and tend to notice things like the suit DC was wearing. Pretty suave but for the pants that he kept having to pull up. Expensive looking, like what Armani might do with sweats, one draw string hanging out below the precisely tailored jacket. DC should’a just done the ties up, and saved us all some anxiety about whether his pants were going to fall down.
The highlight of the evening for me was a very small aside, lightly thrown off towards the end of the show. “Don’t get me wrong,” DC said, apropos of nothing in particular, “I love gay people. I just think they’re gross.”
If the reason we seek out comedy is because it releases some of the tension we feel about how to be in the world, we need it to touch on truths, to rub up against them, test them. One such thorny uncomfortable truth about the hetero/gayness thing is that nobody chooses to be either; we are wired for attraction and the opposite of attraction is, whether we like it or not, repulsion. This is not ideology or acculturation but a visceral, physical feeling. Gay people feel repulsed by hetero sex the same way hetero people feel repulsed by gay sex. As one of the guys I went to the show with said afterwards, “That’s fine, just keep it away from me.” (He was talking about the new brand of moralizing scolds masquerading as comedians, but no matter, I love that expression and it fits this issue well I think.)
Then DC circled back to the gimpy arm that started the show, mimicking that person smiling with glee that the show is okay now that he’s making fun of the gays. Classic. Human nature was ever thus.
Last thought. I dunno, is DC the GOAT? He’s definitely a polished presenter, a good writer with great timing. And he’s a legend; it felt special to be in the same room with him, sharing the experience with 18,000 of my closest friends, as he put it. But did the show blow the roof off? Maybe it’s time for DC to reach into that notebook in the safety deposit box.
One beef I have to mention: stadium sounds systems are totally inadequate to the spoken word. It was loud and garbled, like a Raptor’s announcer. Truly terrible. A lot of lines were missed by a lot of people. We can do better. Similarly, the big screens over DC’s head were a distraction, hard not to watch when the image is so big compared to the little body far away on stage. (And we had pretty good seats.) Maybe subtitles?
I should have said something about the warm up acts. There were three, each a bit better than the one before. Perhaps I’ll add something about them later.
A question that came up after the show, also for another time: Is comedy the same as comics, as in the drawn kind? Are the funny papers funny the same way comedy is funny?
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