Anna Rahmanan | JNS
Dave Chappelle has criticized Israel often in his stand-up comedy performances. In his most recent Netflix show, “The Unstoppable,” released last month and based on a show in his native Washington, D.C., the comedian says that the code phrase, which he would be so unlikely to utter that everyone would know that “they” had gotten to him if he said it, is “I stand with Israel.”
Eli Lebowicz, a stand-up comedian in New York City who grew up as a Modern Orthodox Jew, told JNS that “my initial reaction was disappointment.”
“He was one of my favorite comedians growing up, and now it’s like, ‘Well, we’ve lost another one,’” he said. “Saying something that divisive is just making things so dangerous for Jews, and it’s a shame that he’s gone so far off the deep end with his hate for Israel.”
Lebowicz thinks that it has become “pretty hacky to hate on Israel.”
“There isn’t much humor to it or cleverness. It’s standing on a soapbox grandstanding, when the point should be about being funny,” he said.
The Jewish comedian noted that Michael Che, of “Saturday Night Live,” joked during the COVID-19 pandemic about how Israel had vaccinated half its population. “I’m gonna guess it’s the Jewish half,” he said.
“These jokes are coded antisemitism wrapped in something palatable to the world, because you’re allowed to hate on Israel,” Lebowicz said. “It’s certainly taking a stand, but again, I don’t think it’s particularly brave to rip into Israel. It’s more brave to defend Israel.”
“Comedians used to be calling out a truth in the world, but sometimes they are so wrapped up into team sports or politics that they’re too lazy to do the research or get into the actual conversation about the topic,” he said.
Lebowicz told JNS that Jew-hatred connected to Israel is often not treated as a serious problem, particularly when it comes from the political left.
“It is frequently dismissed, minimized or explained away,” he said.
The comedian thinks that the complex nature of Jewish identity — a mix of ethnicity, religion and culture — gives people “wide latitude to say almost anything about Jews,” because it is difficult to pin a single definition down.
“Since we’re this amorphous blob of whatever people want us to be in terms of identity, there’s free rein to say whatever you want about Jews,” he said.
‘Lack of Creative Thinking’
Jennifer Caplan, associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, told JNS that Chappelle’s line is “a mean-spirited attempt at being ‘edgy’ that he knows will get a rise out of people.”
“I think the intent was to upset Jews, because he expected that to get him headlines,” she said. “The impact is limited, because few people take him seriously anymore.”
“Unfortunately, the impact is still not zero,” she added.
Caplan thinks that Chappelle’s joke reflects “mostly his inability to think beyond the same jokes he has been making for years.” Those jokes are funny sometimes, she said.
“He got a lot of criticism for it and therefore a lot of publicity, so here he is coming back to the same well, only it’s not as well-constructed a line and it isn’t as punchy a conclusion,” she said. “More than reflecting current tensions, I think it reflects a lack of creative thinking.”
Caplan thinks that Chappelle’s joke fits into a broader cultural moment, in which comedians “don’t think too hard about the risks of making potentially offensive jokes.”
“Many people have already written him off based on his history of questionable jokes, so at this point in his career, his risk of losing fans over any one joke are low,” she said. “Those who are still with him are with him because he insults various groups of people, not in spite of that.”
When done well, humor can bring people together and help them “not take everything so seriously or so personally,” according to Caplan.
“But there has to be some sort of ‘we’ for that to happen,” she said. “If humor is just about ‘them,’ with an assumption or reason to believe that ‘they’ are not in the room, then it’s not trying to be part of a difficult conversation, it’s about creating a sense of division.”
Reactions to Chappelle’s line reveal the current climate for Jewish voices in media and entertainment, according to the professor.
“I think a fair number of people just expect mean or bad-spirited jokes from Chappelle, so they don’t react much when it happens,” she told JNS. “But I have been both disappointed and disturbed at the rhetoric around some of the support for the joke. I have seen posts comparing him to Charlie Kirk, for example, as a social truth-teller.”