Up in Flames: Dave Chappelle’s Monologue

I watched Dave Chappelle’s Saturday Night Live monologue from November 12 after reading about its antisemitic content. I like a good social commentary, I like to face hard truths, I like stand up. I am willing to entertain the possibility that some people see antisemitism where there is none. That was not the case in that monologue.

I don’t know whether it was the non-stop tropes or the suggestion that they were true but we’re a protected species or Chappelle’s interjections of earnest bewilderment about decency that gave me the chills at first. But the combination was teeth-chatteringly chilling by the end of the monologue.

Dave Chappelle is an artist, of course. Artists often produce work that inflames us, and the light of those flames can help us see more clearly.

That said, flames can also flicker in a way that distort a clear view; and they can, also, just burn everything down.

I don’t want to throw cold water on artists. I crave the challenges they pose. Yet, sometimes it’s not art; sometimes it’s ‘yelling fire in a movie theater’ and laughing at the chaos. (Or yelling ‘stolen elections’ at a rally down the street from the Capitol . . . but I digress . . .)

Chappelle’s monologue made me laugh, at first. As it went on, I became more and more uncomfortable and then filled with dread. He was ‘punching up,’ which stops being funny pretty quickly to people who rarely see ourselves as ‘up for long.’

In fact, ‘up’ has never been a safe place for us, Jews. Raised by a father who didn’t want anyone to know he was Jewish because it might be dangerous or, worse, offensive; living most of my life in the South where folks grieved for my soul; watching the news; ‘up’ is a terrifying place for a Jewish person to be.

And what the heck is ‘up’ anyway. I get what it means to some communities who have been brutalized by racism or xenophobia: Dave Chappelle, who is currently as ‘up’ as Steven Spielberg, certainly speaks from the experience of ‘not up and not likely to ever be if white people have their way, which they usually do,’ but how in the freaking world do cis white men get to punch ‘up’ at anyone? They do. This is the strategy of white nationalism. Good grief, Chappelle, you’re taking a page from the freaking Proud Boys handbook. But I digress . . .

When Chappelle and Ye and Kyrie Irving punch up, it’s easy to get caught up in a lot of controversies about the shadow of cancel culture, about the light of a partnership born of common cause, about the ash-gray line between comedy and violence. But it’s important to name antisemitic content when we see it. I’ll be wrestling with all of this for a long time to come.

In the case of Chappelle’s monologue last Saturday, there is no warmth for me by the fire he built, only dread.