My colleague Caroline Downey reports that, “Dave Chappelle’s scheduled stand-up performance at a famous Minneapolis venue was canceled Wednesday after social-media criticism of the comic’s transgender jokes.” The cancellation occurred just hours before Chappelle was set to take the stage, which he did instead at Varsity Theater.
The First Avenue management team explained their thinking in an Instagram post: “We believe in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression,” the post read, “but in honoring that, we lost sight of the impact this would have.” In other words, we believe in the freedom of artistic expression except when it upsets the wrong people. In this case, transgender activists.
This explanation is risible. The organizers knew perfectly well who Dave Chappelle was and the kind of jokes he makes. They did not have a sudden epiphany — only a failure of courage. Some people expressed outrage on social media, and they buckled, it’s as simple as that. To keep things in perspective, consider how Chappelle has been physically attacked on stage for his comments and doesn’t let that stop him.
Chappelle has made clear that, to him, this isn’t about transgenderism, much less about him. That’s why, instead of giving his name to a theater school he attended — which also flirted with the idea of canceling him — he chose instead to name the Duke Ellington School of the Arts theater, the “Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression.”
The whole point of comedy is that nothing is off limits. As I wrote earlier, the value of trans-skeptical comedy is that it helps puncture overinflated sacred cows. The more of these antics we see from business owners, organizers, and administrators, the more justified Chappelle is in mocking transgenderism.