E88 | Dave Chappelle- what's in a name? (Stand-up comedy/ speech)

<p>Netflix has repeatedly <strong>doubled down</strong> on the transphobia they host on their platform, so this latest example should probably come as no surprise: on Thursday, the streaming service released a speech by Dave Chappelle called <em>What’s in a Name?</em>, in which the comic calls the students who pushed back against the transphobic jokes in his standup special <em>The Closer </em>“unfair” and “instruments of oppression.”</p><p>The 40-minute speech, which quietly dropped on Netflix without any prior announcement, was recorded at Chappelle’s alma mater, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., during a ceremony to rename the school’s theater after him. However, in his speech, Chappelle announced that due to the controversy surrounding him, he declined to have the theater named after him. (The school eventually named it the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression instead.) Students at the school confronted Chappelle over the transphobia in <em>The Closer</em> during a Q&amp;A back in November, and while the first 30 minutes of his speech at the naming ceremony mostly focus on his years attending Duke Ellington, the final 10 minutes address the pushback he received at that November event.</p><p>“All the kids were screaming and yelling. I remember, I said to the kids, I go, ‘Well, okay, well what do you guys think I did wrong?’ And a line formed,” Chappelle said. “These kids said everything about gender, and this and that and the other, but they didn’t say anything about art. And this is my biggest gripe with this whole controversy with <em>The Closer</em>: That you cannot report on an artist’s work and remove artistic nuance from his words. It would be like if you were reading a newspaper and they say, ‘Man Shot in the Face by a Six-Foot Rabbit Expected to Survive,’ you’d be like, ‘Oh my god,’ and they never tell you it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon.”</p><p>Where, exactly, is the nuance in a joke that <strong>likens a trans person’s genitalia to an Impossible burger</strong>, tho