Comedian Dave Chappelle performs at Madison Square Garden in New York on Aug. 22, 2023.Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Dave Chappelle is happy to make tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans comedy routines—”I’m team TERF,” he said in a 2021 special—but now apparently draws the line at Republicans turning those jokes into policy.
In a Wednesday interview on NPR’s Newsmakers show, Chappelle said he resents that the Republican Party’s 2024 platform “ran on transgender jokes” and was “a weaponized version of what I was doing.”
He recalled a time when Lauren Boebert, then a GOP House rep from Colorado, took a photo with him and shared it on Instagram with the caption “Just three people who understand that there’s only two genders.”
“She should never do that with a person like me,” Chappelle said.
But the comedian has long injected anti-trans material into his comedy shows, most notably in a multiyear, multi-special streak beginning with his 2017 Netflix special Equanimity. In that special, and in 2019’s Sticks & Stones, Chappelle called being trans similar to lying about one’s racial background: In Equanimity, he compared being trans to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended to be Black. The 2021 comedy special in which he claimed to be on “team TERF,” The Closer, included Chappelle’s extended defense of J.K. Rowling, whom he stated was “canceled” for saying “gender was a fact.”
“On behalf of the trans community, I’ll go ahead and address your weakest defenses. How much do you have to participate in my self-image? Not at all.” Dahlia Belle, a transgender comic, wrote in the Guardian shortly following the release of The Closer.
On Wednesday, Chappelle asserted that he was the subject of “rage-baiting” during this time. “I am a filthy nightclub comic,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin. “That’s all I see myself as.”
“People had drinks, and they just were gruff and said what they said back then. And it was never a big deal,” he continued.
But Chappelle’s fixation on trans people, and anti-trans routines, extended across years and multiple specials. They were indistinguishable from, and grist for, the material of conservative streamers and right-wing edgelords. The comedian’s remarks about what would happen if LeBron James said he was a woman and dominated the WNBA were used in Donald Trump’s 2021 rally against trans rights; Candace Owens made the same Rachel Dolezal comparison last year.
“I challenge Black cishet men to interrogate what their identity means to them,” writer and transgender rights activist Raquel Willis wrote in a 2021 social media post about Chappelle’s comedy. “Who are you without being the “head” of the household/tribe/culture?…Who could you be if you took on expanding Black masculinity and manhood without having to repress other Black experiences of the feminine, gender nonconforming, queer variety?”
