‘Now you have jokes?’ he said in the special
Dave Chappelle’s new comedy special on Netflix is already making headlines, especially for what the comedian had to say about other headlines. The Dreamer dropped on the streaming service on New Year’s Eve and covered a variety of topics, including Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars and how it affected him during his own attack at the Hollywood Bowl three months later.
Chappelle discussed touring with Rock after the slap in his special, telling his D.C. crowd how eager he was to hear how the comedian would publicly address Will Smith slapping him on the Oscars stage after Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s shaved hairstyle. Chappelle was backstage when Rock filmed his own Outrage Netflix special that addressed the slap and proclaimed to a Baltimore crowd, “I refuse to be a victim.”
Per Chappelle, the most offensive thing about the slap was that Smith “enjoyed the rest of his evening” afterward.
Chappelle then moved on to talking about his own attack, which occurred during his Hollywood Bowl show on March 4, 2022.
“Everything is funny until it happens to you. Three months, a mere three months after that terrible attack that Chris Rock endured, I was on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, and a lunatic jumped out of the crowd and attacked me.”
At the time of Chappelle’s attack, he was in a whirlwind of backlash following his previous Netflix special, The Closer, in which he made several transphobic and anti-LGBTQ remarks. In The Dreamer, Chappelle claimed, the “It was a trans man!” joke he made at the Bowl at the time of the attack was due to shock and trying to recover from Rock stealing his thunder in the immediate moments after the apparently homeless man jumped on stage to attack Chappelle.
“I’m sitting up there trying to think of what to say. I’m tongue-tied… I can’t think of anything to say, and look at my karma. Of all the people in the world, Chris Rock walks from backstage, walks up to me in front of 20,000 people, grabs the mic out of my hands, looks at the crowd, and goes, ‘Was that Will Smith?’ Motherf–kers fell out of their chairs laughing,” Chappelle detailed. “I was standing there looking stupid. I was f—ing furious because I’m thinking in my mind, ‘N—-, this is my attack. You got attacked three months ago. Now you have jokes?’ So, I snatched the mic back from Chris and tried to get one off, but my sh– did not go good at all. I just said, ‘It was a trans man,’ and the crowd was like, ‘Boo, this is L.A. We like trans people. Boo!'”
The comedian also recalled how he got himself into further hot water the subsequent night when he did a surprise show, and a crowd member asked what happened with the attack. Chappelle was unaware of a journalist in the surprise show crowd and replied.
“All I said was that this n—- had a knife that identified as a gun,” he explained in The Dreamer. “I got six more weeks of bad press for that joke. I didn’t even do anything to this n—-. That’s not right. That was not right.”
However, Chappelle was even more annoyed with the New York Post, which published an interview with his attacker shortly after the attack. In the interview, Chappelle’s attacker Isaiah Lee said he was “triggered” by the comedian’s jokes which targeted homeless and LGBTQ people. Lee identified himself as bisexual in the interview, which Chappelle pushed back on during The Dreamer special.
“He’s allegedly bisexual. I’ll need to see him suck somebody’s dick before I believe the rest of this article,” Chappelle said on stage before adding, “I read that shit in the paper. I was horrified. I was like, ‘Bisexual? I could have been raped.'”
The homophobic joke isn’t winning Chappelle any positive press, of course. Meanwhile, Lee was sentenced to 270 days in jail in December 2022 for tackling the comedian during his show.
The Dreamer is now streaming on Netflix.
