“They even got poor Kevin Hart,” Chappelle says.
Everyone’s doomed,” He defends Louis C.K., freely admitting that he’s biased as he’s friends with the guy. “This is the worst time ever to be a celebrity. “I’m sorry, ladies, I’ve got a fucking #MeToo headache,” Chappelle complains. Kelly documentary filmmaker Dream Hampton under the bus to make that point.) 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. (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. It’s the kind of purposefully ludicrous statement that’s designed to provoke, of course - it's not even funny so much as shocking. 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.” 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.
Chappelle proudly confesses as much early on in the special: “I’m what’s known on the streets as a victim-blamer.” 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. I promptly unfriended her and reminded myself to never get into Facebook arguments they were a black hole. 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. It was something mean and cutting, and I definitely went on about how he had been acquitted. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote under that girl’s status. He still had that wide, broad, and beautiful nose that looked like my nose (and that I too had once hated).
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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.
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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. 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." Michael Jackson had just died, and my Facebook feed was disturbingly lacking in sympathetic words of sorrow. 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.
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.