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At times, Dave moved around on the stage with the sharp, almost cartoonish energy that gave his sketch comedy such a potent punch. The majority of the Seattle set was very funny.
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Worse, while the globally-distributed Netflix specials finally prompted widespread complaints about the material, comedy fans have been criticizing Dave for similar material since before his previous Radio City Music Hall residency in 2014. Since this film formed the core of my impression of Dave as a performer, it was especially disappointing to hear material that was so regressive, exclusionary, and cruel. Through Dave’s excited and genuinely enthusiastic interactions with anyone with something interesting to say, the film lives up to its title by feeling like a big party the viewer has been invited to, with the comedian as the generous and welcoming host. In one segment, Dave gets to know Arthur and Cynthia Wood, eccentric owners of the Broken Angel House, a wildly unique blend of found structure and architectural sculpture located on the street where the block party is being held (now tragically torn down, but immortalized in the movie) in another, he visits the school Biggie Smalls attended when he was a child and speaks to one of Biggie’s childhood friends.
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The movie is funny, exciting, politically charged, and even heartwarming, as Dave interacts with the performers and the wide demographic range of regular people he’s invited to either watch or play a part in the all-day show, staged in the heart of Brooklyn’s impoverished and increasingly gentrified Bed-Stuy neighborhood. It’s a celebratory, joyous movie, in which Dave warmly invites people from his hometown and from around New York City to a secret festival filled with some of his favorite musical acts, including Kanye West, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, and a reunion of The Fugees. Throughout, Dave used the slur “tranny” instead of “trans.”Īlthough Dave is most famous for “The Chappelle Show” and the stoner comedy Half-Baked, my personal introduction was the 2006 Michel Gondry documentary Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Finally, he closed the subject with an imagined scene about a trans woman “tricking” a man into having sex, a familiar transphobic trope. He trashed the notion that trans people experienced similar or worse types of discrimination as the black community. He began by deadnaming and misgendering her, reminiscing about seeing “Bruce on the Wheaties box” as a child, with his retrospective horror at admiring a trans woman serving as the punchline. What I didn’t respect was the lengthy segment on trans people, which started with complaints about Caitlyn Jenner ruining his memories and got worse as it went on. It was heavily flawed (he affected a stereotypically effeminate voice when recounting something a gay man said, and expressed wariness at gay political causes), but there was at least a mild sense that he was trying to push back against his set ways in order to expand his horizons, and I respected that. This was lightly confessional as well, with Dave admitting it took him a long time to understand gay men, describing how he slowly became more comfortable with their presence. Some of this material, especially his thoughts about Cosby, had a confessional quality in which he struggled to find a balance between extremes.Īt another point in the show, he also performed some material about his wife’s gay friends. Despite signs everywhere warning attendees not to interrupt the performance, he chatted directly with the crowd about a few subjects, including the (then-)upcoming election and the legacy of Bill Cosby. At its best, the show was a uniquely intimate experience, with Dave eventually dropping the pretense of a traditional rehearsed routine, sitting on the edge of the stage and interacting directly with the audience. Back in March 2016, I attended the first of Dave’s four shows over two days at the Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington.