In his new Netflix special Sticks and Stones, Dave Chappelle set a trap for his audience and they walked right into it. "I want to see if you can guess who it is I'm doing an impression of," he said. "All right? Let me get into character. You gotta guess who it is, though. Okay, here it goes. 'Uh, duh. Hey! Durr! If you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I'm gonna try to take everything away from you, and I don't care when I find out. Could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now. If I find out, you're f---ing-duh-finished.' Who's that?"
Chappelle waits a beat while the audience — bizarrely — guesses that he's doing an impression of President Trump. Chappelle rears his arm back and points at the audience: "Thaaaaaat's you! That's what the audience sounds like to me!"
Chappelle explains that the modern audience is so tedious to entertain it's almost not worth trying.
Stand-up comics are the frontline fighters of the culture war for a reason: It is their job, more so than even musicians or artists, to push boundaries, to turn sacred cows into hamburgers. They identify and probe societal tension without any mandate to heal the fissures — though humor itself can serve as a salve. This is undeniably healthy for a society, but it's also what makes the industry unacceptable to the militant humorlessness of "cancel culture."
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