Netflix quietly released a comedy special from comedian Dave Chappelle after his recent transphobic joke controversy.
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Netflix quietly releases new Dave Chappelle special after transphobic joke controversy
Netflix has gone against the "woke mob" and decided to not cancel Chapelle over what his detractors call 'transphobic' jokes.
Chapelle
'What's in a Name', released on Friday, primarily focuses on a lecture Chappelle gave at his alma mater, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., in November.
At the time, the school intended to name a theater after Chappelle. But his speech was not well received by many students who reacted with outrage to jokes he had made about the transgender community in his controversial 2021 special 'The Closer'. Chappelle later decided against having the theater named in his honour.
'What's in a Name' discusses the theater's renaming as well as the heated Q&A session with students during his visit to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
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"All the kids were screaming and yelling. I remember, I said to the kids, I go, ‘Well, OK, well what do you guys think I did wrong?’ And a line formed. These kids said everything about gender, and this and that and the other, but they didn’t say anything about art," Chappelle said in the new special.
"And this is my biggest gripe with this whole controversy with ‘The Closer’: You cannot report on an artist's work and remove artistic nuance from his words," he said.
"It would be like if you were reading a newspaper and they say, ‘Man Shot In The Face By a Six-Foot Rabbit Expected To Survive,’ you’d be like, ‘Oh my God,’ and they never tell you it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon," Chappelle continued.
He claimed that the Q&A hurt his feelings and noted that the students who slammed him during his lecture took issue with his "freedom of artistic expression."
"When I heard those talking points coming out of these children's faces, that really, sincerely, hurt me. Because I know those kids didn't come up with those words. I've heard those words before. The more you say I can't say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it," Chappelle said.
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"And it has nothing to do with what you're saying I can't say. It has everything to do with my right, my freedom, of artistic expression," he continued.
"That is valuable to me. That is not severed from me. It's worth protecting for me, and it's worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions."
It is not yet disclosed how much he has made from the new special, but going by his past Netflix specials, a good guess would put it at least over USD 20 million.
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