Ted Sarandos and Dave Chappelle Are Missing the Criticism’s Point

The second memo that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos issued to Netflix staff about Dave Chappelle and stand-up comedy only proves that he doesn’t understand why people are actually upset about how Chappelle approaches transgender people in his new special “The Closer.” In his first response, Sarandos emphasized that even if “some people find the art of stand-up to be mean-spirited … our members enjoy it.” In the second, he again asserts Chappelle’s right to “artistic freedom.” In both, he underlines that neither he nor anyone with sign-off power at Netflix believe that Chappelle’s extensive material on transgender people crosses the line of being “designed to incite hate or violence” — and even if it did, violence on TV doesn’t necessarily, “directly translate to real-world harm.”

Together, Sarandos’ memos do little to address the actual criticism of “The Closer.” They do, however, provide an unusually forthright window into how the executive leading one of the most powerful networks in the world seems to misunderstand the very basics of how people can be influenced by media.

Chappelle knew as he took the stage for “The Closer,” his last Netflix special for the foreseeable future, that readdressing his past material on the LGBTQ community — a phrase he says with enough labored emphasis to elicit the nervous audience laughter he was looking for — would prove controversial. The fact that it did isn’t a bug in his comedy, but a key feature. What’s genuinely surprising about how Chappelle talks about trans people in “The Closer,” then, is how much he talks about trans people, period. It’s clear that the blowback he’s gotten over the years from “that community” has stuck with him in a way he finds unfair. His “objective,” he says straight off the bat, is to answer “all the questions you’ve had about all the [LGBTQ] jokes I’ve said these last few years.” And so for the majority of this set, Chappelle does everything from express solidarity with trans people, to declare himself “team TERF” alongside J.K. Rowling, to wonder if there’s “even such a thing as a woman or man or anything anymore.” He shares anecdotes about befriending a trans woman and beating up a trans woman. He calls North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom law “a mean law” before going into graphic detail about what he would think, and see, should a trans person sidle up alongside him at a urinal.