The New Yorker:

Dave Chappelle, early in his new, predictably incendiary Netflix special, “The Closer,” says, in an understatement of the obvious, “I’m rich and famous.” He says it en route to the larger observation that, if the pandemic has been trying for him—he contracted covid-19 in January but was asymptomatic—it has been far more so for people who fall into neither category. But from there he detours into an extended series of jokes about the L.G.B.T.Q. community—he refers to being trans as the gender equivalent of wearing blackface—which have mired the special in controversy.

For two weeks after its release, on October 5th, “The Closer” was among the ten most viewed programs on Netflix—but it was also met with outrage. Jaclyn Moore, the showrunner for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” who is white and trans, denounced “The Closer” and pledged not to work with Netflix in the future. (This led to a social-media backlash from people asking why “Dear White People,” a show about Black perspectives on white racism, had a white showrunner to begin with.) B. Pagels-Minor, a Black trans nonbinary Netflix employee who was helping organize a workplace walkout to protest “The Closer,” was fired for allegedly leaking internal documents about the special to the press. (Pagels-Minor denied leaking the material.) The walkout took place on October 20th.

Meanwhile, in response to allegations that Chappelle’s comments in “The Closer” might lead to violence against trans people, Ted Sarandos, a Netflix co-C.E.O., in a memo sent to employees, defended the special and cited other more L.G.B.T.Q.-positive content on the platform, such as the comedian Hannah Gadsby’s two specials. Gadsby responded by denouncing Netflix, with poetic economy, as an “amoral algorithm cult.” Sarandos also noted the company’s “strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.” This was a curious position, and, on Wednesday, Sarandos felt compelled to concede that, in fact, “content on-screen can have an impact in the real world, positive and negative.” Comedy is powerful precisely because it riffs on and ridicules mores and habits. And within that arena no one is more successful, relevant, or influential than Chappelle.

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