Sundays at the Theater With Steve: A Reflection on Stephen Sondheim

 

Now there is no hat. Where there was a hat. And life is not the same.

My reaction to the death of Stephen Sondheim was not exactly rational, even as emotional things go. It was easy to find connections with him in my life, but hard to say why any of them would have brought me close to tears. The most obvious ones I came up with are too indirect to have much emotional impact, so I kept exploring.

One is that he studied composition with Milton Babbitt. An odd fact for someone who is generally considered one of the greatest geniuses of the Broadway musical; Babbitt was a strictly atonal composer, one whose stringent formalism was a model for composers when I was a composition student at Northwestern. I studied there with David Noon, who was a student of Mario Davidovsky, who also studied with Babbitt. So there you go, only four degrees of separation: Alterman - Noon - Davidovsky - Babbitt - Sondheim.

Another has to do with Sondheim's musical Saturday Night. Written in 1954, it was to be his first musical, lyrics and score. But it was cancelled due to the death of a producer. In 1997, more than 40 years later, Saturday Night was finally produced by the Bridewell Theatre Company in London. The story has to do with young men growing up in Brooklyn, and for the promotional artwork the designers chose a photograph of three boys sitting on a pier with the Manhattan Bridge in the background. That photograph, Boys on Pier, Manhattan Bridge, was taken by my uncle, Harold Roth, in 1948. I now own the rights to Roth's work and the prints he left behind when he died in 2001.

Here is one of the original prints next to the sheet music booklet for Saturday Night:

The same cover design was used for the original cast CD, fliers and posters.

None of this really gets at why Sondheim's death seems so personal to me. Nor does the following, though it is a bit closer: My mother died early this year, age 91; she was found on the floor of her home in Delray Beach, Florida, where she lived alone. Sondheim, age 91, was found on the floor of his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he lived alone. The cause of my mother's death is unknown, but it came as she appeared to be getting over a bout of COVID. The cause of Sondheim's death has not been announced, but he died just as news of the new Omicron variant of COVID was reaching the public. It occurrs to me that if someone has devoted his life to musical theater, then at age 89 watched Broadway shut down and revivals of his work get postponed for 2 years due to COVID, hung in through all that, and just as everything was opening up again, news of a variant that could send us back to square one reached him, he might not survive the emotional shock of that. I don't know if this was true or if he even heard the news, but he was said to have been in good health before his death.

I suppose this focus on morbidity is not what anyone wants to hear, but with the emotions regarding my mother's death still raw it was hard to keep my brain quiet when I heard the news, particularly right after a Thanksgiving that would be the first one she missed and the last one Sondheim enjoyed.

Sondheim grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where my parents moved (from Brooklyn) when I was ten years old. We lived in a tenement on West 83rd Street; he lived in the San Remo, one of the most famous buildings in a neighborhood full of famous buildings (the Belnord, the Apthorp, and of course the Dakota) where an arm's length list of famous actors and musicians have resided. To me and my friends, the San Remo was just the most distinctive piece of skyline you could see from Central Park. Too bad he did not have a happy childhood there; I suppose mine was a bit better, if poorer.

But let me finally say what I think is going on with my Sondheim connections. Of all his musicals I have only ever seen Gypsy and a film version of West Side Story, to both of which he only wrote the lyrics. I narrowly missed seeing a production of Into the Woods before the pandemic, but I own the soundtracks to a A Little Night Music and Sunday in the Park With George. None of that explains how I felt at hearing of his death. 

No, it can only be one thing: Judy Collins' recording of his most famous song, "Send in the Clowns". Why? Because I loved the song from the first time I heard it? There are lots of songs I love, and lots of people love that one but may not feel it in quite the same way, even if they are songwriters like me. I think it represented for me a kind of paradigm of how to be a songwriter, a model that I could mentally turn around and examine to remind myself how it's done. 

Strangely enough, in interviews Sondheim said that he kind of tossed off the song. He said he needed to find something with short phrases for Glynis Johns (the original Desirée in A Little Night Music) because she couldn't sustain notes; that he had the idea that questions would make naturally short phrases, and to use the stage metaphor because, fictionally, she was an actress. And then bing bang boom it all came together in two days. Including the fact that it would have to be in two different meters (9/8 and 12/8).

That's great - when you're a genius it all seems simple. And even when you're not, songs do sometimes seem to pull themselves out of thin air and you have little to do but take notes. But it's more than the fact that the song is inspired, which goes without saying. The first thing that struck me about it was the line, "Sure of my lines" - you have a sad song in a major key, then it sort of tumbles into minor in the bridge, which heightens the tension, and then, as the bitterness of the situation becomes clear, descends almost chromatically through the line "Making my entrance again with my usual flair". Finally, dropping the sarcasm that guards the rawness of her emotions and letting herself admit the self-doubt that underlies the whole scene, she sings "Sure of my lines", and the tonality descends into near chaos as the singer traverses a diminished fourth, an awkward melodic interval that emphasizes the interiority of the emotion, and the troubled backward glance at that false sense of security.

If you are not a musician you surely have no idea what I just said, but the point is that a seemingly insignificant musical touch just nails the emotional content, creating a mystical moment in which the singer suddenly lays it all bare and you share her sense of despair. That is the stuff of genius.

Then there is the way the lyrics seem to alternate between a controlling theatrical metaphor, which is brilliantly deployed again and again, and a second metaphor about clowns, until they somehow magically seem to come together at the end of the third verse: "Don't bother, they're here". Now, in fact, as Sondheim explained, it is all one metaphor, the clowns being sent in to cover when a performance is not going well. The star is reviewing her mistakes, or failures, and asking for the clowns to be sent in to distract the audience from them. But I think the clowns work on another level, which I realized when Sondheim said it could have been "send in the fools" instead - that is, the "clowns" metaphor captures the growing feeling of foolishness, particularly about the actress's illusion that with her well-honed skills she could bend reality and undo the error she made when she rejected her lover so many years ago.

Now let's look at the melody itself. It seems to have just three basic elements, which makes their contributions easy to isolate, and to see how they relate to the meaning of the song. One is the jump from the 3rd to the 4h note of the first two lines of each verse: isn't--->it rich, are we--->a pair. This motion is completed by a fall of an octave at the end of the verse: you in<----midair. (Note that there are a number of ways in which Fredrik, the previously rejected suitor, could be thought of as being "in midair" - between two women, two stages of his life, his sexual and emotional desires, etc.) The leap ending in a fall perfectly captures both the spirit of the drama and the literal meaning of the first verse, "me here at last on the ground, you in midair".

That line, though, has more of an implication of a dance performance than drama, as does "one who keeps tearing around, one who can't move", while "losing my timing this late in my career" could indicate a performance of almost any sort. So the setting of those lines actually provides the third element, a rolling melody that is somewhat reminiscent of circus or carousel music, but is also very close to a waltz, a dance which literally employs lilting, up-and-down and sweeping motions. So what the whole thing amounts to is a leap into the air, a giddy ride followed by a fall: exactly what the fictional actress is experiencing as she confidently ventures a proposal to her ex-lover, sure that it will be warmly received ("I thought that you'd want what I want") and then suddenly finds herself falling without a parachute when he rejects her offer.

This is my perhaps over-analyzed take on the common observation that Sondheim was able to use songs to move his dramas forward. Before him, songs in musicals were often a pause in the dramatic action, a kind of break for the audience. He made them part of the drama, a way of deepening the personalities of the characters. In fact, "Send in the Clowns" is partially re-worked as the show's closer, now conveying a completely different feeling in which the characters have been reconciled to their own foolishness and accept one another and themselves.

I could probably go on a bit longer, but it comes down to this: Sondheim put everything you need to know about songwriting into a 4-minute song. Almost everything: the line "Don't you love farce" is awkward, forcing singers to breathe between the last two words or risk the suggestion that she is professing an affection for derrieres. (Barbara Streisand seems to pause for a drink between them.) All this shows is that an errant brushstroke in a Rembrandt is worth talking about more than the same mistake in a million other works of art.

I don't know if I've really said what I wanted to say about Sondheim and how his death affected me, or why. Perhaps, ultimately, it comes down to respect: the idea that someone could take a form of entertainment that sometimes seems one step from kitsch, and make it into something that seems one step beyond opera. Some modern operas have serious subject matter and the highest level of musical creativity, but no one saw that coming in the Broadway musical until Sondheim did it.

I think I've run out of words - highly unusual for me. Fortunately, Sondheim saves the day:

    Somebody crowd me with love.
    Somebody force me to care.
    Somebody let me come through,
    I'll always be there,
    As frightened as you,
    To help us survive,
    Being alive.
    Being alive.
    Being alive!

It does sound like he wrote them this year. They're from Company, 1970 
- and 2021. Maybe now I will finally get to see one of his musicals.

Dave Chappelle and "The Closer" (II): Terrestrial Demographics

 

I set out to write some comments on Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" focusing on his two jokes about "Space Jews". Originally I thought I would send it as an Op-Ed to the Times; as usual with such thoughts, the piece got too long, so I cut a lot of the material below. Then I changed my mind and decided to post it to The Parrot's Lamppost, so this post is partly the material I cut from the previous one, and partly some additional thoughts.

Meanwhile Chappelle has responded to his transgender critics, or rather, to the perceived judgment that he is being held to account for what he said about them in "The Closer". He is not backing down on anything and clearly still trying to drum up support - in this case, with a story about a special he did in a cornfield which is now meeting resistance in the distribution channel. "So am I cancelled or not?" he asks before casually tossing the microphone over his shoulder.

"Cancelling", that effluence of unregulated social media, stands in an awkward gap between free speech and bullying. I have nothing to do with it, and like Chappelle my main reaction is that Twitter is not a real place. But that doesn't mean we all have to sit down, shut up and laugh at whatever Chappelle takes to be amusing. Anyway, after The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox and so many others have weighed in, what are the chances that a squawking parrot can "cancel" Dave? We'll probably have less impact than intellectually feeble adulatory rants like this. Be that as it may, your bird will sing, be the impact what it may.

It is a notable fact, of Chappelle's own making, that of the thousands of possible subjects for comedy, he has chosen things like the claims of the transgender, gay rights and women's movements, as well as Jews, Asians and other vulnerable populations. Nobody forced this on him, so it is a bit disingenuous when he gets the criticism that might be expected, and pushes back as if he is the one who has been injured. "I'm the only one who can't go to the office", he says. Well - is the point that there are trans comedians making jokes about black folks, and they can "go to the office"? If so, that's wrong, of course; but since he chose his subjects and got paid $20 million per special to talk about them it's not like he was in a corner or something. I have to say that I admire both Netflix for not caving in to criticism and removing the shows, and the communities for not backing down in light of Chappelle's defensive gestures.

By chance I happened on a NY Times Magazine article from a year ago - the title in print was "The Last Laugh", by Dan Brooks, but online it is called "How President Trump Ruined Political  Comedy". It contains some telling analysis on conservative comedy, including this:

...any statement that gets too much blowback can become someone else's failure to take a joke.

            This approach lets irony serve as a stalking horse for ideas that decency prevents the ironist from advancing seriously.

Referring to conservative comedians Steven Crowder, Jesse Watters and Milo Yiannopoulos, Brooks says,

All three men construct jokes that operate in a gray area between tweaking political correctness and simply repeating the prejudices it forbids.

In his estimation, "ambiguous irony has allowed both political comedians and pundits to say what cannot be said."

Much of that could be applied with equal accuracy to the recent comedy of Dave Chappelle. No one will accuse him of being a conservative, but the thrust of "The Closer" and some of his other recent work has an eerie similarity to the methods of conservative "blowback" that Brooks put his finger on. Chappelle wants us to sit back and relax as he throws "forbidden" barbs at various communities, and then demands the space to say "but it's comedy, give me a break!" when people object. If that doesn't do it, he insists that we listen more closely to see that his jokes are not really aimed at these various marginalized groups. And if we are still not willing to follow him down that path he insists we don't have a grip on reality ("gender is a fact" he states informatively) or reminds us that white activists are always willing to jump across the racial barricades when push comes to shove. It's a lot of moves to defend jokes that, prima facie, seem offensive.

Apart from the "Space Jews" routines, "The Closer" includes obvious, raunchy bathroom and bedroom humor, a critique of racial myopia in the women's movement and a true story about his supportive relationship with a trans woman who was an aspiring stand-up comedian. The most common word in the show is either "bitches" or "niggas" (which I shall reproduce in this form only insofar as I am quoting Chappelle). Both words lose their shock value by repetition.

Actually I'm not sure if any shock value still remained in the "n-word" after Richard Pryor famously introduced, and later abandoned, the use of it in his routines. Lenny Bruce once repeatedly ran through a long list of ethnic insult words with the goal of something like what psychologists call "semantic satiation" - where words temporarily lose meaning due to repetition. Here the words seem in line with a delivery style derived from ghetto talk and hip hop culture. In his Ohio show on 6/6/20 he also says "I use the word 'bitch' all the time because it's black." That seems to be another version of "it's all in the delivery", and Chappelle lacks nothing in terms of delivery. He gets plenty of women laughing at what he says about "bitches", and I'm not going to get on a pulpit and say they shouldn't, it's demeaning, etc. So I'll focus on other aspects of his humor.

Chappelle minces no words about racism; he delivered a lengthy monologue on the George Floyd murder at that 6/6/20 show, and he was clearly not looking for laughs or even applause, he was saying how it affected him and how he appreciated the protests. But he is not always heavy, and delivers some self-deprecating humor as well. He actually opens "The Closer" with a routine on COVID-19 in which he describes getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as "the most nigga-ish thing I've done in a long time". But anyone who follows him knows that such self-deprecation comes wrapped in a lot of context. So for contrast we have one of the funniest lines in "Sticks and Stones", where Chappelle relates an interaction with a television producer who told him he cannot say "fag---" on tv. He asked why not, when he says "nigga" all the time? "Because you're not one of them," she tells him. "That's true," he replies, "but I'm not a nigga either!" Zap!

But notice something: here we forgive the way he skirts the logic that is really behind the producer's remark, because the sentiment seems genuine. What the producer meant is that we reserve to each ethnic or national group the right to use common insults about themselves, but rarely give such license to others. Jews can call one another "Yids" or joke about our schnozzolas, but it's a rare situation where someone else can do it with impunity. So Chappelle doesn't really have a license to talk about "fag---s", but he can go ahead and mock Martin Luther King's speech patterns and use the n-word as he pleases. His response to the producer is brilliant but slightly off-target; and we let it go because we want it to be right.

But when he discusses other communities things get dicier. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine may deserve some ribbing, but, "I'll have what the homeless people are having"? There's a sense of "the homeless get screwed" there, but it comes with a very rough edge, a distancing that suggests he is really better than them. Another joke reifies Trump's reference to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus": referring to news media coverage of attacks on Asians by black people he says that he failed to get sick from COVID because the same thing was happening inside his body. Is Trump the target here? If so that's pretty subtle for stand-up, where the impact has to be immediate if you want a laugh. Maybe Chappelle was just satirizing the trope about black-Asian antipathy. He's not above using just about anyone as the butt of a joke (the Amish take it on the chin pretty squarely in one of his routines) but it is usually possible to read it as a humorously hyperbolic reaction to some existing prejudice rather than an exercise in prejudice itself.

As I said above, though, that ambiguity can be a dangerous tool, should it fall into the wrong hands. You might say that the entire support for the limb Chappelle is out on is our willingness to treat him as everyone's friend, underneath it all, whether that assumption is earned or not. It takes a lot of courage to walk that line, putting your audience in that position and hoping they give you the benefit of the doubt. With the "Space Jews" jokes he definitely crossed the line for me: clever, not particularly funny, and no underlying truth to them either. I wonder how Asians took the COVID joke. If that moral ambiguity fails too often it's not a good sign.

Another one of his routines has a laugh at the expense of both trans women and veterans, a bit of crude bathroom humor that involves a reference to the kind of wound that male veterans might find least amusing. So you might say to yourself: "No one could be that heartless about a wounded veteran, so it must be rooted in empathy." Well, someone very prominent in American politics made some of the most repulsive comments ever aired in public about veterans and still got elected, so we can't just assume that everyone on a stage cares much about veterans, or everyone listening to them either.

Yet another routine involves Chappelle's alleged sexual abuse by a preacher: "Don't feel bad for me - I liked it", he says, and then attempts to make the preacher sound like the loser in the transaction. I don't know if Chappelle was really a victim of such abuse, but even if he was, and this way of dealing with it works for him, I wonder if other victims wouldn't feel more like it was a fresh assault. A longer discussion of pedophilia in "Sticks and Stones" was better prepared and somewhat less graphic, but this quickie gets crammed into the act as if he needed to make up time. Child sexual abuse is one of the few subjects where the demand for trigger warnings is arguably justified. Since trigger warnings in stand-up comedy are all but guaranteed to ruin the jokes, maybe the standard should be that if you can't ease into it, don't do it at all?

Chappelle insists he is not a misogynist; in fact, he is a "feminist", if that means believing women should have equal rights. Good; welcome to the mid-20^th century, at least. "Equal rights" is extremely vague, though; depending on where and who you are it can mean anything from equal pay and employment opportunity to the right to work at all. He has stated clearly enough (in "Sticks and Stones") that he is pro-choice; the routine involves a sort of giveback to men, but it is a funny quip and he's probably not holding us to it. He directs some barbs at the women's movement, mainly for what he takes to be its whiteness. But as for women, once again there is that ambiguity in some of his jokes that lets him say things with a note attached: "Of course I don't mean to offend anyone personally by calling them a 'cunt'; it's comedy, after all." Actually in his 6/6/20 show it seems that he does want to offend someone that way. I don't know what attraction this holds for him. You get more bang for your buck calling someone an "ignorant cretin" or "pathetic jerk" or hundreds of other nice putdowns than with the commonplace, non-specific "cunt", which seems to say little more than that "I hate women like that".

He also has nothing against gay people, he just envies the progress they have made, by comparison with people of color. He is upset that DaBaby was taken to task when he "made a very egregious mistake" with repeated, vile remarks about gays and people with AIDS. Chappelle's delivery often starts with a factual back story that shades into pure setup, so it is not really clear whether characterizing DaBaby's remarks as a "mistake" is something he sincerely believes or just part of the setup for the next gag. "Can't do that... can't do that," he says - is this "can't" as in shouldn't, or as in there will be consequences for your career? (See what I mean about ambiguity?) Regardless, it was certainly not a "mistake", it was intentional homophobic bigotry. Does Chappelle believe it was wrong, or not? He doesn't really say.

The gag that follows is way off base too. This involves (spoiler alert) an ironic reference to the fact that DaBaby's career didn't suffer after he shot and killed a man, but it did when he made homophobic remarks: "In our country you can shoot and kill a nigga, but you better not hurt a gay person's feelings!" Chappelle's effort to focus on the contrast between racism and homophobia, or black liberation and gay liberation, shows once again how a funny quip can mask very faulty reasoning. DaBaby was not charged with a crime (other than carrying a concealed weapon), because he convinced the police that he fired in self-defense; he also posted on Instagram to the effect that he was protecting his family. So the incident hardly shows that nobody cares as much about killing a black person as they do about insulting gay people. What it shows is that his constitutional right to be held innocent unless proven guilty was respected; while his crude and explicit hate speech was rejected. (Just to be clear, I am not taking sides over the morality of the shooting; but the evidence available to the public was not sufficient to say "he got away with murder, so let's not let him play on this Dua Lipa single" or whatever.)

Chappelle clearly has nothing against transgender people, for some of his best friends are trans - or at least Daphne Dorman was, until she was driven to suicide after trans advocates dragged her for defending him. That may be on the trans community, but he seems to think that because she indulged his humor transgender activists ought to take a lesson from her. That's really up to them, and I can see how some of his jokes might set them off. One that could trigger the transphobia alarm is the statement that so-called TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) see trans women the way black folks see white people in blackface. The joke seems to imply not only that trans women are not women in the true sense, but that their "impersonation" of women is offensive, because blackface is offensive. (Cf. the recent case of composer Bright Sheng and the Othello video.) By itself, the line pins the comparison on others. But then he claims to be "team TERF" and repeatedly admonishes his audience that "gender is a fact". That is a lot to swallow, even if there is room for discussion of how trans women are and are not like cis women. Moreover, to define yourself in terms of the exclusion of certain types of people is just bigotry; in this sense, TERFs stand with Trump and his coterie of Christian fundamentalists.

Stepping outside the theater for a minute, I'm not sure J.K. Rowling, whose conflicts with trans activists are the kickoff for Chappelle's routine, counts as a TERF at all, because "radical feminist" does not seem to describe her. Anyone can be a feminist in some lightweight sense, including Dave Chappelle, as he pointedly reminds us. A "radical feminist" is usually understood as one who takes one or more positions that is more antagonistic to traditional sex roles than merely arguing for women's equality - e.g., one who advocates female or lesbian separatism, wants to criminalize pornography, or finds women's oppression to be inherent in the nature of capitalism. I don't think Rowling or several other women who have been labelled "TERFs" are radical feminists. In fact, their belief that biology is in some sense destiny is a position that used to be taken by anti-feminists, with different implications. The ideas that trans women don't stand in the same relationship to the women's movement as cis women does not make someone a "radical feminist", or transphobic, for that matter; but to self-define as "trans-exclusionary" makes someone a bigot no matter what comes after it.

Chappelle's repeated comment that "gender is a fact" seems directed against the claim that gender is socially constructed. This is a rabbit hole he probably should not go down, because arguments grounded on the claim that "race is a fact" are almost always attempts to justify racism in one form or another. Of course, just as "biology is destiny" has suddenly been stood on its head by some feminists, so has this: whereas it was once considered scientifically false and racist to assert that there are basic biological differences between races (because "there's only one race - the human race"), both the scientific facts and their social implications have been reconsidered, with some in the scientific and intellectual community (including critical race theorists) embracing the reality of race in the context of a struggle against racism. Which aspects of race or gender are socially constructed and which are genetically given? There are some obvious facts and falsehoods, and a lot of gray areas. The appeal to common sense in the statement "gender is a fact" is dangerous in that it may be a way of pushing through some of the falsehoods under the guise of obvious truths. But what is surely not a fact of biology is that trans and cis women cannot be equal participants in the women's movement, or shouldn't use the same bathrooms. That is a socially constructed platform of feminists who only deserve the name "radical" for their narrowmindedness.

Chappelle's contrast between the effectiveness of black liberation initiatives and those of movements he needles for being "white" when they need to be seems to me exaggerated. The civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter, among others, have certainly not lacked for achievements, while the biggest victory for women in the last 50 years may be about to evaporate, and gains for transgender people have been mostly at the local level here and there. What is true, though, is that what you might call the "arc of liberation" for a people whose history in this country began with chattel slavery is much longer and steeper than it is for any other social group; so even very significant gains may still leave them much further from true equality than others were before they even began to fight. But, as has been said before, liberation is not - certainly not always - a zero sum game. Women's and LGBTQ liberation in particular do not come at the expense of black liberation.

In any case, there are few if any strictly "white" liberation movements, even though there are inner tensions over the proper thrust of some movements and the role of people of color within them. Not to excuse the racial myopia they sometimes exhibit, but depicting them as expressions of white privilege is not constructive. Even a women's or LGBTQ movement that plays primarily by a white playbook will have benefits for women and gay/trans people of color; the point is to nudge them in the direction of more conscious appreciation of the specific issues of black and brown people. Would Chappelle welcome a really powerful women's or LGBTQ movement within the black community, one that could not be called on the carpet for white privilege? I'm really not sure, for I suspect such a movement might have little truck with his current brand of humor.

Chappelle is not just a comedian but an orator, and for all his dependence on old Anglo-Saxon words, quite a brilliant one. His 6/20/20 show had virtually no jokes, and it is hard to imagine a more intense speech on police violence. But I am not always persuaded that he uses this talent fairly. There is a theme to some of his remarks in which he assumes the role of the injured party, implying that we are obligated to grant him a license to say whatever he wants just because he is a comedian plying his trade. I will say one thing in favor of this, and it has to do with the comedic voice. There is a "voice" to every utterance, be it straight, sarcastic, pedantic, tongue-in-cheek or whatever. The comedic voice can often be taken to be prefaced by something like this: "Here is the natural reaction to this sort of thing, though I'm not saying it is right: ..." As I said in the previous post, you play to your audience's underlying assumptions in order to get a laugh, and it doesn't always mean justifying those assumptions. But Chappelle sometimes undermines his ability to use position as a defense. Sometimes, as with "Space Jews", his convoluted setup for the joke betrays his own interest in making a point, not the receptivity of the audience; while in other cases he turns to straight lecturing to tell us what he thinks ("gender is a fact").

In any case, comedy has a long history - Aristophanes, Chaucer, Twain, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Jon Stewart - and raising painful issues for people facing various forms of injustice is hardly the only way to make a living at it. Certainly he doesn't always do this; but "The Closer" had a few too many instances of it.

I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of stand-up, and I would not be shocked if someone pointed to an example of a white comedian who made remarks no less offensive than Chappelle's and was never called on the carpet for it. But Andrew Dice Clay was excoriated for homophobia and more in Dice Rules, and Louis CK (along with numerous other white male celebrities) was not spared a #MeToo shaming, though it was not for making offensive jokes. (If only he had done it underneath the bed instead of on top he could have passed it off as serious performance art.) Chappelle seems bent on not merely questioning today's high expectations of sensitivity but at least occasionally flying in the face of them. It's as if he painted himself into a corner and is now mad at people for pointing out he's in it.

In a moment one has to acknowledge as touching, he refers to LGBTQ activists asking him not to "punch down" on them, and he similarly asks people not to "punch down" on him for pursuing his art. But you can't compare someone offended by a stand-up comedian who may have crossed a line and caused pain with a stand-up comedian offended by someone who doesn't appreciate the joke. The former is punching up, not down; the latter has a bully pulpit and a $20 million contract. It's just not a fair comparison.

Chappelle has a problem now, and as one of the top comedians in the world I assume he will find a way to get through it. He took a break earlier as he questioned whether he was happy with what he was doing on The Chappelle Show with regard to depictions of black characters, and for some reason decided his new direction would be taking the anti-discrimination struggles of others as a subject for comedy. But he did this at a time when their issues are being taken very seriously in the entertainment world, as is the movement to confront structural racism. You could say there was a problem of judgment there.

Well, you do have to take risks, right? Lenny Bruce took risks; Dick Gregory took risks; Andy Kaufman, Richard Pryor, Cheech and Chong and many others refused to be limited by convention. But they didn't take these risks at the expense of other vulnerable people. It would feel much better to have him in the ring punching up, down or sideways at the many actors on the world stage who truly deserve to be on the receiving end of his wit.

Chappelle says he will not do another special for a while, though in his Instagram post he complains that he has been trying unsuccessfully to distribute a special he recently did in a cornfield. Maybe he could use another timeout; he took a rather long one before, an opportunity for introspection. "The Closer" doesn't have to be anything more than a slightly fraught step on the way to finding his new voice.

Dave Chappelle and "The Closer" (I): Space Jews

This blog has been mainly concerned with perspectives on cultural issues in New York City, especially the intersection of politics and the arts. How appropriate, then, that Dave Chappelle, like so many other stand-up comedians, learned his art in New York's comedy clubs. Truthfully, I would have been inclined to write this piece even if he didn't, but it seems history is on my side. I therefore intend to post a follow-up on other aspects of Chappelle's "The Closer" shortly after this.

The final installment of Chappelle's Netflix comedy series has generated controversy primarily because of his remarks about transgender people. But two of his more eyebrow-raising jokes are about Jews. I get that it's comedy; I even get the jokes, which apparently quite a few people didn't, given the tepid reactions. I don't think someone is going to attack a synagogue because of Chappelle's jokes. I don't think Chappelle should be "cancelled" - a word almost meaningless to those of us who disdain Twitter, hardly use Facebook and cancelled Instagram (literally - my account was hacked before I ever opened it).

But I do think the jokes are worth unpacking, because they tap into beliefs and assumptions that are shared by various critics of Israel, including some prominent voices in Congress. In fact, I used to share some of them myself. Now I don't even think they're funny, and certainly not true.

Israel is an appropriate target for a great deal of criticism - even a brief discussion of what I think they have done wrong would take an essay, not even a long blog post. (But we could start with their recent declaration of certain Palestinian human rights groups as "terrorist front" organizations - if they're channeling some of their money to the PFLP then arrest those responsible for that, don't ban the organizations.) But the underlying logic of Chappelle's jokes questions the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and makes a one-sided attack on a people who have suffered the most severe oppression of any race on earth. That should not go by without comment.

Jokes whose apparent target is Israel do not in themselves make Chappelle an anti-Semite; they do depend on some very insensitive assumptions, which he might or might not embrace when made explicit. (I wonder if Chappelle would give me a similar suspended sentence in the event some joke of mine contained unstated negative implications about people of color?) But having converted to Islam 20 years ago he may have no more objective a view of Israel than anyone else with a stake in the relationship between Jews and Muslims.

Chappelle spends plenty of time in "The Closer" explaining why he has nothing against the people he tells jokes about, but he neglects to extend this courtesy to Jews. Why? Each of the two jokes requires a fairly detailed fictional setup, and the punch line (the same for both) at first sounds like a non sequitur. Indeed, it is a non sequitur: the apparent target is Israel, not "Jews". He does warn his audience, after the first joke falls fairly flat, with perhaps a catcall or two, "It's going to get worse than that!" It's a telling comment, both a recovery line after a weak gag and a defiant refusal to apologize for offending anyone.

One joke (spoiler alert!) begins with a reference to recent news coverage of "U.F.O.'s" (a government report called them "U.A.P.'s" - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). This leads to a shaggy dog story about a race of technologically sophisticated earthlings who left the planet long ago and have now returned to reclaim their former home: "Space Jews". The other begins with the story of a black slave who was manumitted only to become a particularly cruel slaveholder himself, which is to be made into a movie called "Space Jews". Both narratives might have their biggest appeal to woke leftists, who might not be inclined to sit through an hour laced with patter about "bitches" and "frumpy dykes" and a Chinese virus, so that alone could account for why they landed with a thud. (That the second received a slightly warmer reaction is probably due to the fact that it was second; Mark Twain observed a long time ago that he could have an audience in stitches by using the same bad punch line repeatedly.)

Chappelle obviously thought it was clear enough that the jokes were directed at the state of Israel, not "Jews" in general. But "Space Israelis" would surely be an even worse punch line, to say nothing of "Space right-wing Israeli politicians, religious fanatics and settlers", who might be the only legitimate targets. So you need a more concise punch line. But similar logic surely would not justify substituting "Palestinians", "Arabs" or "Muslims" in a comedy routine whose target was "Islamic extremists and terrorists"; so why is "Space Jews" okay? Why might people be inclined to dismiss the jokes about "Space Jews" as dumb but harmless when we would see the parallel case as bigoted, venal and ignorant? Responsibility for intransigent Israeli policies lies with those who support them, not with "Jews".

Chappelle's sci-fi fantasy suggests that the Jews became a diaspora in order to explore new worlds. This setup elides any mention of the fact that the Jewish people were driven out of their original homeland in one violent assault after another. Jesus of Nazareth was one of tens of thousands of Jews tortured to death on the cross by the Romans, while other Jews were murdered en masse, their religion violently suppressed and their main temple destroyed. Some astronauts. It's hard to see how this fantasy is any less insensitive than one that described the African diaspora as leaving on the Starship Enterprise rather than slave ships.

The Space Jews then return and "decide that they want to claim the earth for their very own" after "things go terrible for them on the other planet". This, at least, has the seed of truth: the primary drivers of migration to Israel, or what is called in Hebrew "Aliyah", have been pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Holocaust, and, after the 1948 U.N. resolution creating Israel and Palestine, anti-Jewish laws, expropriations, racist riots and expulsion from Arab states. Vitriolic discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union was a later spur. These still searing pains certainly bear out the idea that things didn't go too well for us; they also make it a lot less funny, especially when dropped into a comedy routine with scant context.

The contrast of Chappelle's humor with historical reality is also concealed in the ambiguity of claiming "for their very own" a land to which, the joke implies, Jews were no longer entitled. Since the demise of the ancient Jewish empires, the land that is modern Israel was ruled at various times by the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Ottoman Turks and finally the British. Both Jews and Arabs had originally migrated there from Egypt, Syria and nearby nations, and both put up occasional resistance to foreign domination; but no native peoples ever held state power in the territory. Jews, who were present in much smaller numbers than Arabs at the end of the 19^th century, purchased land while the area was under British domination over the next several decades (mostly in flight from European oppression) and their combined resistance finally freed the area from colonial domination after more than two millennia. Hostility between the two religious and ethnic groups resulted in the U.N. decision to create two new nations where there had been none. Such is the alleged land grab attributed to these Jewish space travelers.

As for Jews enslaving their former oppressors, it is surely one of the most peculiar slave systems in history. The "enslaved" within Israeli borders not only have the right to vote and be represented in the Knesset but now form part of a coalition government. The slaveholders recently had to pull down their armored window shutters and run for cover as the elected representatives of the enslaved in Gaza rained 2,000 missiles down on them. I mean, I'm capable of appreciating irony: the "enslavement" is really a reference to various forms of discrimination, which I neither deny nor condone. But only with regard to Israel would anyone even get the hyperbole. Reference to people of color as being "enslaved" in the U.S. today would not even register as humor. Reference to Jews as manumitted slaveholders is pretty off the wall: some Israeli Jews are descendants of some of the most recent modern slaves, those forced to work in Nazi factories. I think Chappelle should seriously consider how far you can go with historical distortions before the label "anti-Semitic" becomes appropriate. Would Holocaust denial also be acceptable if it gets a couple of laughs?

Intended or not, the ultimate implication of the two jokes - that Jewish people have illegitimately occupied Israel and that they have enslaved the Palestinians - amounts to denying the legitimacy of Israel and the U.N. resolution that created it, an extreme position that is contrary to international law and directed at the sole democracy in a region of brutal, autocratic dictatorships.

Israel is a nation of refugees from Europe (not Europa), Asia and Africa (not Andromeda). Most who arrived were lucky to escape with their lives, most of their possessions having been expropriated and some of their relatives murdered. Dave Chappelle has also had some hard knocks, despite being the son of an American college professor and Dean of Students and a woman of considerable accomplishment, but he is now absurdly wealthy: the $20 million he made for his 1-hour-plus Netflix set (and it was not the first) is something like 10 times the lifetime earnings of the average college-educated American. From that position, with an international audience, social responsibility is about the least one could ask.

"Space Jews" doesn't seem to meet that standard, but taken literally it could describe one historical fact: after increasing hostility to them in Arab nations following the partition of Palestine, practically the entire Jewish population of some countries was airlifted to Israel. These Jews do get around, though not quite to outer space.