Netflix / Via screenshot Dave Chappelle in his new Netflix special, Sticks & Stones.

What’s the most embarrassing public statement you’ve ever made that you’ve had to walk back? As a Sagittarius and a former conservative evangelical Christian — and quite a zealous one — I have plenty. I won’t regale you with all of them, but certainly one of my top 10 is when I logged on to Facebook dot com in the year of our Lord, 2009. Michael Jackson had just died, and my Facebook feed was disturbingly lacking in sympathetic words of sorrow. One girl whom I went to high school with posted a status about how she didn’t understand why people were so upset about his death — he was "a gross pedophile." I was in a vulnerable place. The high school I went to was full of white people who liked to listen to Dave Matthews Band and ask me whether I tanned. I had spent hours in a fugue state watching videos of Jackson when he was a lanky teenager, wiggling his sequined hips in the “Rock With You” music video, his skin still the color of a coconut husk. He still had that wide, broad, and beautiful nose that looked like my nose (and that I too had once hated). I don’t remember exactly what I wrote under that girl’s status. It was something mean and cutting, and I definitely went on about how he had been acquitted. She responded by saying that swooping in to comment on the post of a random classmate I wasn’t even friends with in real life to defend Jackson was proof of how ridiculous I was being. Touché. I promptly unfriended her and reminded myself to never get into Facebook arguments; they were a black hole. I thought of that time, and that current of righteous anger, as I watched Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks & Stones, which came out this week and has been predictably pilloried for its dismissal of sexual assault victims and anti-trans jokes. Chappelle proudly confesses as much early on in the special: “I’m what’s known on the streets as a victim-blamer.” He defends Jackson, conceding that even if the two men who came forward in HBO’s documentary special Leaving Neverland earlier this year were telling the truth, it would be an honor to be molested by a musical legend: “I know more than half the people in this room have been molested in their lives. But it wasn’t no goddamn Michael Jackson, was it? This kid got his dick sucked by the King of Pop! All we get is awkward Thanksgivings for the rest of our lives.”

Chappelle still wants it both ways. He is willing to address criticisms of his earlier sets that were more flagrantly, lazily anti-trans, but not actually apologize or admit to changing his mind or express any meaningful empathy.

It’s the kind of purposefully ludicrous statement that’s designed to provoke, of course — it's not even funny so much as shocking. You hear the audience gasp. (But the loudest boos of the whole night are reserved for when Chappelle jokes about how there’s no such thing as good 36-year-old pussy, which is the punchline to an R. Kelly bit. It’s telling that you can hear an audible exhale when Chappelle concedes that Kelly probably did rape his alleged teenage victims, even though he throws Surviving R. Kelly documentary filmmaker Dream Hampton under the bus to make that point.) “I’m sorry, ladies, I’ve got a fucking #MeToo headache,” Chappelle complains. “This is the worst time ever to be a celebrity. Everyone’s doomed,” He defends Louis C.K., freely admitting that he’s biased as he’s friends with the guy. “They even got poor Kevin Hart,” Chappelle says. He describes Hart’s 2011 tweet about smashing his hypothetically gay son’s head with a dollhouse as “obviously” a joke. That’s before he launches into a whole spiel about “the unspoken rule of show business,” which “is that you are never, ever allowed to upset the alphabet people” — those people being “the Ls and the Gs and the Bs and the Ts.” At this point, we’re reentering a familiar cycle: Chappelle releases a special on Netflix, he says something incendiary, it’s quoted back to him in a headline, and Chappelle reacts to the criticism in another Netflix special. But Sticks & Stones feels distinct in that it encapsulates Chappelle’s paradoxical urges. You could say he’s doubling down, as some critics have written, but that's not quite right. It’s a low, low bar, but some of the more truly vile anti-trans stuff has been excised from this recorded special. (It was filmed in Atlanta in 2019, two years after his sold-out run at Radio City Music Hall so maybe he's had time to rethink the "man-pussy" jokes he made then). But Chappelle still wants it both ways. He is willing to address criticisms of his earlier sets that were more flagrantly, lazily anti-trans, but not actually apologize or admit to changing his mind or express any meaningful empathy. In his 2017 special, Equanimity, he talks about receiving a letter from a white trans fan who criticized his transphobia, using the remark to essentially make more tired anti-trans jokes (and it turns out some of the details of the bit were highly embellished). And in a surprise epilogue to Sticks & Stones, he tells another story about Daphne, a trans woman who attended several of his sets in San Francisco and laughed hard at every joke. Afterward, according to Chappelle, they chatted at the bar and Daphne thanked him for “normalizing transgenders.” The audience at the Broadway theater, where Chappelle told this story, applauds loudly. It’s cringe-inducing — such a blatantly cynical, familiar move out of the old “I have a marginalized friend, so I can make this joke” playbook. (When Louis C.K. joked about his black friends who have stood by him, I imagine he must have been talking about Chappelle.) What is especially frustrating about Chappelle’s trans jokes is how he essentially acts as if black trans people don’t exist, and as if black trans women in particular aren’t more likely to be victims of violence. His truth-to-power comedy only works if he acts as though trans people and black people are wholly separate entities. It’s enough to make you want to tie Chappelle to a chair and force him to binge-watch episodes of Pose. Even if you ignored all the offensive jokes — which is a big ask, so I understand if you can’t — you’re still left with comedy specials that aren’t even particularly funny.

It’s enough to make you want to tie Chappelle to a chair and force him to binge-watch episodes of Pose.