I desperately wish I found Dave Chappelle's AIDS joke funny. But I don't.
If you want to make jokes about AIDS, please at least have earned it.
Several years ago, I remember watching a skit done by Dave Ilku of my beloved comedy trio Unitard, whose other two performers are my brilliant friends Mike Albo and Nora Burns. If you’ve seen Unitard before, you know that they’re quite irreverent, sometimes edgily so, and very talented at skewering some of the vapidness and pretentiousness of the gay community. In this particular skit, Ilku, who is a physical comedy genius whose facial expressions and voices alone can send me into paroxysms of laughter, did a 30-second wordless mime routine of a gay guy getting fucked in the ass, getting sick and then dying—of AIDS, obviously.
Upon the dying moment, I laughed in that groaning, gratifyingly shocked “Oh, no, he didn’t!” kind of way. I’ll admit that, as someone who, by that time, had lived with HIV for many years—but, I should stress, never in the pre-cocktail era of sickness and constant fear of death—I felt a bit poked, called out, by the skit. After all, I was one of those gays who’d taken it up the ass without a condom, which led to that notorious knock-out flu, which—prior to the cocktail era—might very well have led to my untimely end, as it does in the skit.
But the skit was still hilarious to me—the main reason being, that it had come from gay comics who I knew had lost at least a few friends to AIDS, or at least helped them through their diagnoses, in their many years in NYC’s urban gay community of the 1980s and 1990s. The skit hit that sweet spot where it’s so wrong that it’s perfect, mainly because it’s coming from people who get it and had somehow earned the right to make a joke in that realm. When people who’ve been through something, or are truly adjacent to having been through something, and make a joke about it, it’s funny, because we understand it’s a kind of rebellion, a catharsis—daring to make light of something that has given their world a lot of grief. It’s like when Joan Rivers made Holocaust jokes. No way did Joan, born in 1933, grow up without knowing how heavily the Holocaust must have weighed on her Jewish family and community. Hence, she had the currency to make the joke. (And yes, I realize that, as a Gentile, it’s slightly presumptuous of me even to say that!)
All of this brings me around to the brilliant Black straight comedian Dave Chappelle. Last night, I was talking to a friend of mine who is also gay, my age, living with HIV—and, like me, can have a pretty sick and inappropriate sense of humor. (Hence why we’re friends.)
We were talking about Chappelle’s latest round of offending people by making jokes at the expense of gay and transgender people—particularly transgender people. I’ll admit this much—I have zero patience for anyone, including a comedian, making jokes about a group not only that they don’t belong to and know nothing about, but a group that regularly suffers violence rooted in precisely the same sort of “you’re not real, hence I can treat you however I want” hostility that Chappelle demonstrates when he, say, compares the surgicalized genitalia of trans people to fake meat.
Some have defended Chappelle by pointing out that he let the white trans performer Daphne Dorman open for him in 2019. Dorman later killed herself. Does Chappelle not understand the link between the relentless cruelty of his anti-trans rants and the fact that trans folks have higher-than-average suicide rates (not to mention dramatically higher homicide rates)?
However, I’ll admit that when it comes to two group I belong to—cisgender gay men and people with HIV/AIDS—I’m game for a joke from someone not in that group…if the context makes it land. In a piece I wrote a few years ago about gay men and misogyny, I said that I actually thought it was funny that the actor and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan had said that gay men had fought “for the right to stand on top of a float wearing an orange Speedo and take molly.” I called the line “a hilarious bit of reductionism,” but reductionism works when it contains a grain of truth. And, especially spending a lot of time this summer on Fire Island—specifically, the Pines—I know there are plenty of gays who fit that description: boys for whom gay life doesn’t mean much more than sex and pleasure. (I guess my puritanical Faggots-era Larry Kramer side is showing!)
Plus, whether I’m right or wrong, I’ve always had a soft spot for cisgender women who are true allies and friends of gay men but who also are a bit overwhelmed by gay men’s hedonism. I think it comes from something that gay men seldom think about, which is that women, even if they wanted to, probably could not engage in the level of sexual freedom that gay men do—such as completely anonymous sexual encounters—without assuming a higher level of risk to both their safety and their reputation.
But when it comes to straight men making gay jokes, those jokes better land. And that means that, ultimately, the joke better be about straight people in relation to gay people. I’m thinking about how Seinfeld handled gay jokes. Even Louis C.K.’s skit about a bunch of straight guys being obsessed with their one gay buddy’s sex life, brilliant in its discomfort and ambivalence about homophobia, passes that test.
But when a joke doesn’t pass that test, it’s just gratuitously cruel. And gratuitously cruel is not funny. Humor relies on puncturing something most of us feel needs to be punctured—like privilege and power, and the abuses and injustices that come from it, or the threat something represents. There was a time—say, back in the Eddie Murphy 1970s and 80s—when enough people still felt like homosexuality or AIDS were enough of a threat for it to be worth jabbing at. But as more gay people and people with AIDS came forward with their truth, and as more people realized that gay people and those with AIDS weren’t a threat so much as they were threatened every day by a society that hated them—then, to paraphrase Morrissey, that joke wasn’t funny anymore. Jokes are funny, cathartic, when they take a good hard swipe at something whose power can’t be easily swiped at otherwise—like Trump back when he was president. Jokes at his expense were a constant reminder that we, as a society, were not just going to surrender to his power—or normalize his cruelty.
So when Dave Chappelle said recently that the rapper DaBaby—who recently came under fire for homophobic and AIDSphobic things he said on stage—“punched the LBGTQ [sic] community right in the AIDS,” my also gay and HIV-positive friend and I disagreed on whether that was funny. I think my friend thinks it’s funny just because it’s just so wrong—that if we don’t simply let comedians (and everyone) be wrong, shocking and transgressive, then we’re infringing on free speech. He also thinks the idea of “punching someone in the AIDS”—which, technically, you cannot do—is funny.
But to me, it’s not funny because, to my knowledge, Dave Chappelle has no stake, nor has he ever had a stake, in the fight against AIDS. Because sometimes when you’re really in something, you might make a joke about it that doesn’t land, but at least we understand that it’s coming from the fact that you are in it—that you are letting off steam, that you can see the excesses and follies of your own community, that on some level you might even be taking the piss out of yourself.
Dave Chappelle, to my knowledge, has no stake in the fight for gay people, or people with AIDS. If he did, I’d have more ambivalent feelings about his AIDS remark. If it were made by someone like, say, Madonna or Patti Labelle, I’d say, “Girl, no! Just…no!”. But I’d interpret the remark as some kind of misguided attempt to signal, “I’ve been in this with you for a long time and I’m letting off some steam for all of us.” As I did with Ilku’s AIDS mime routine. It’s funny because we know that Unitard really understands the darkness behind the joke, and hence how liberating it is to joke about the darkness in the first place.
Not so with Chappelle. When he says that DaBaby punched queer people “right in the AIDS,” I hear someone who has always casually associated gay people with AIDS but who I wouldn’t be surprised to learn has not spent one day of his life living and feeling up close the enormous pain that AIDS has caused the gay community.
I’ve also scrupulously avoided contending with Chappelle’s defensive remarks that the LGBTQ community has made strides faster than the Black community. He said, in fact, “I can’t help but feel like if slaves had baby oil and booty shorts, we might have been free a hundred years sooner.” (That line actually made me laugh. To me, it feels wrong in just the right way.)
The only thing I want to say about the above is—does Chappelle even know who HIV/AIDS continues to hurt most in the U.S. in 2021? If he has some 1980s vision of a bunch of oiled-up gay white party boys in booty shorts getting HIV and dying from it, he’s wrong. I probably don’t need to tell anyone that, at this point in history, nearly 10 years into an HIV preventive pill that has largely benefited gay white men, the group that continues to be hit hardest by HIV—by the pain of diagnosis, of disclosure, of criminalization—is Black gay men and transgender women. I’m not the first to point out that the LGBTQ v. Black binary that Chappelle sets up in his defensive remarks is a false one. But it’s worth repeating.
So why does he continue to be not merely unfunny but cruel and violence-baiting toward a community that he actually is a part of? He seems to have a lot of issues with the new edict that he only “punch up” in his comedy. What he’s missing is that you don’t “punch down” merely because it’s un-P.C. You don’t punch down because your joke won’t land. You’ll come off at worst as an asshole, at best as someone incapable of imagining what life is like for anyone but your own demographic as you narrowly define it.
That sounds like creative death to me.
Thanks for this. I have no desire to watch this particular comic, but I really appreciate your perspective on the issue