‘Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones’ On Netflix Doubles Down On His Critics

I don’t know what they’re teaching kids these days, but for those of us born in the 1970s, Dave Chappelle included, we learned how to deal with insults via rhyme: Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.

Chappelle has won two Grammy Awards in a row, and last year’s Emmy Award, for his Netflix stand-up specials. The comedian also attracted pushback, much of it from women unhappy with his characterization of the #MeToo movement and defense of Louis C.K., as well as the transgendered community, disappointed in his jokes about them.

Well, Chappelle not only heard those complaints, he acknowledges them in his new Netflix special, Sticks & Stones. He also doubles down on the material that generated scorn against him. In the first half-hour, Chappelle defends CK, Kevin Hart and Michael Jackson, and vows to keep writing and telling jokes about transgender people because he simply finds it too hilarious to stop doing so.

But first (chronologically, at least), some context.

We begin with Chappelle already onstage, a capella singing the opening lyrics to Prince’s song, “1999.” He juxtaposes that musical nod to the end of the world with a gambit on suicide, likewise illustrating two life stories that ended in failure. It’s unexpected, certainly, even as a move from a guy generally regarded as sitting atop the stand-up industry. And that’s his point.

We don’t know what’s really going on in any person’s life, celebrity or not. Although as one of the former, Chappelle jokingly asks for our pity. “This is the worst time ever to be a celebrity,” he says.

He believes social media has partially inspired this “celebrity hunting season,” searching for past sins or sinful posts that can bring them down. Not that Chappelle himself feels he has anything to fear, but he leans into his own transgressive nature, nonetheless.

Jokingly qualifying his defense of the late King of Pop by adding, “I am what’s known on the streets as a victim blamer,” Chappelle drags Macaulay Culkin’s name into the mix, as if his status as a non-victim clears Jackson of any and all other charges against him.

Chappelle overlooks Hart’s marital infidelities to describe him as “damn near perfect,” so he can defend Hart’s past homophobic jokes as just jokes. He does that, though, to paint a bolder picture, one in which he recalls a past incident with Comedy Central’s standards and practices office on what he could and could not say on Chappelle’s Show. “But you see, what I didn’t realize at the time, and what Kevin had to learn the hard way, is we were breaking an unwritten and unspoken rule of show business. And if I say it, you know that I’m telling you the truth. The rule is that no matter what you do in your artistic expression, you are never, ever, allowed to upset the alphabet people.”

Chappelle almost makes peace with it, and with the LGBTQ+ community. Almost.

There’s a “weird-timed phone call” that rings from the audience, interrupting the comedian at that moment. It’s doubly weird since Chappelle was the first and biggest comedian to institute no-phone policies and procedures at his shows. And yet, it happens.

Chappelle acknowledges that he doesn’t blame transgender people for hating him for his jokes. And he finds a colorful allegory in describing how each of the letters in the LGBTQ+ community get along with each other as passengers in a car. But he then hits the brakes on any conciliation he has made by comparing transgender to the idea of himself feeling he wasn’t black. Just as the Comedy Central employee had disrespected Chappelle by conflating gender and race, so, too, does he conflate the two without seeing his error.

He’s more calculated in his jokes imagining LeBron James transitioning, and wondering how that would impact his career, or in challenging anyone to call the police on what Louis C.K. actually did, and finally in defending himself for suggesting that the #MeToo movement beware the backlash. In this instance, he reminds his fans in the Atlanta audience that they live in one of several states that have enacted harsher anti-abortion laws since #MeToo.

Chappelle celebrated his forty-sixth birthday over the weekend with a block party in Dayton called Gem City Shine to benefit and honor the families of victims of that city’s recent mass shooting. In the second half of Sticks & Stones, Chappelle talks at length about mass shootings, about the preposterousness of learning his kids endure school shooting drills, and about how a trespasser on his rural Ohio property prompted him to buy his first shotgun.

From his perch in Ohio, Chappelle also has seen the opioid crisis, and he brings both guns and drugs back to race relations in America, where he not only offers funny solutions, but also finally finds one joke target for whom nobody would feel sorry.

The comedian does offer one final olive branch to his critics, noting that he often only makes jokes about people and things with which he identifies. It’s a sincere moment, leading to a sincere story from his childhood.

To everyone else watching him on Netflix, he issues a qualifier that reminds us that he did already cop to blaming victims. “Remember, bitch, you clicked on my face!”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones on Netflix