With ‘The Closer’ Dave Chappelle Reveals the Path To Comedy Is Achieved Through Self-Actualization and Purpose

I can’t help but see a divine symmetry in what will likely be Dave Chappelle’s last full length comedy special for a minute, The Closer, and the calamitous fiery collapse of Facebook happening almost simultaneously.

One common denominator heard over and over describes Chappelle’s works as different.

This description is apt. Chappelle is different, because he’s engaged in a discourse that is the precursor of comedy: the socratic method and dialectic.

Chappelle is a public intellectual.

Dialectic and Difference is the first systematic exploration of philosopher Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical philosophy and its implications for ethics and justice.It’s a philosophy. But it’s not didactic.

Bhaskar’s ethics connect basic human ontology with universal principles of freedom and solidarity. He marries (‘constellates’) these with a grasp of how principles are historically shaped. His account of freedom moves from the infant’s ‘primal scream’ to the eudaimonic society, but thinks the limits to freedom under modern conditions. The morally real in ethics and justice is displaced and reconfigured as relations between “the ideal” and “the actual.”

Eudaimonic is the type of happiness or contentment that is achieved through self-actualization and having meaningful purpose in one’s life.

The heart of Bhaskar’s work is a concern with the real and with purpose.

So is Chappelle’s.

The Closer is exactly that — the coda to a body of work that began with The Age of Spin and Deep in the Heart of Texas. Those were followed by Equanimity, The Bird Revelation, Sticks & Stones, and 8:46 (released on YouTube but produced by Netflix).

To be offended by Chappelle is easy. Too easy.

It ignores too much consideration. Too much linguistic legerdemain. There’s no way that Chappelle can make a joke that at once eviscerates and elucidates the LGBT movement in the way that he has (the gays are driving the car…) without recognizing that he is someone that has put great thought and consideration into this aspect of the human condition.

It is with that same consideration that his work too must be measured.

He is a truth teller and soothsayer.

There’s an episode of Iconoclasts on Sundance Channel, right after Chappelle’s Show ended where Dave took a road trip to spend the afternoon talking with Maya Angelou. That, to me, was a defining moment in the artist Dave would become after he pushed his own brakes and changed direction.

He is also fiercely concerned with the human condition and rejects essentialism.

I believe that Chappelle’s fixation on the transgender condition arises from that rejection.

Chappelle understands ideological fluidity, and the rhetoric of the trans movement is often at odds with itself both seeking to reject essentialism and embrace fluidity but obsessed in many ways with fixed identities.

It is itself a dialectic.

Chappelle has so moved the goal posts that he is in rarified territory. He exists in a world he has almost singularly wrought.

“Punching down requires you to consider yourself superior to another group. Chappelle doesn’t consider himself better than me in any way. He isn’t punching up or punching down. He’s punching lines. That’s his job and he’s a mater of his craft.” #SticksandStones #imthatdaphne

As the world seems to be waking up to the trap of social media and the demise of Facebook, Chappelle’s line, “apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a fuck because Twitter is not a real place” could not be more accurate or factual.

To be everything to everyone is to mean nothing to no one.

Chappelle evokes James Baldwin in a deft and sublime way. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Chappelle if nothing else confronts the uncomfortable.