Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones has a 17% Tomatometer but a 99% Audience Score

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There are many fallacies contained in Sticks and Stones’ hour-plus of pop philosophizing, and few worth picking apart. Kevin Hart was “precisely four tweets short of being perfect” for the Oscar job, and no amount of apologizing could make up for it. (“But he never actually apologized!” a small voice inside you may object, until realizing Chappelle would never internalize a set of facts that counter either his aggrievement or the jokes he sources from it.) #MeToo went too far, and now several states, including the one where the Atlanta-shot special was filmed, have passed near-total abortion bans. (“Movement conservatism goes back a lot further than that!” the same voice will exclaim.) Show business has one unspoken, ironclad rule: “No matter what you do in your artistic expression, you are never, ever allowed to upset the alphabet people,” meaning members of the LGBTQ community. (“Doesn’t the very existence of this special prove otherw…” the voice will trail off, before falling silent forever.)

Underlying these convenient shortcuts—which are taken to set up some punch lines better and sharper (“My shite’s like an above-ground pool”) than others (“Somebody’s gotta teach these kids there’s no such thing as a free trip to Hawaii”)—is a much deeper contradiction. All this casual bomb-throwing, delivered with Chappelle’s signature smirk and walk-away-from-the-explosion shuffle, is conducted under the pretense that Chappelle is a truth-teller. Like so many other comics, Chappelle sees himself as countering conventional wisdom with hard realities the audience doesn’t want to hear, cushioned by a laugh. But Chappelle’s takes don’t defy establishment thinking at all; they simply channel it.

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Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones Fights for the Rights of the Already-Powerful

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Watching Dave Chappelle’s latter-day comedy specials—the most recent of which was released on Monday—is like dropping in on a rascally uncle who doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, how much he’s disappointing you. Maybe he was a favored relative once, the kind of eyebrow-wagging scamp who made the other grown-ups uncomfortable just to entertain you but also gave you peeks into adult complexity that few others would. He was more clever than anyone you’d met up until that point, and there was something impressive about the lengths he’d go to make you laugh. Then he went away for a long time, and while you changed with the times, he fashioned himself a badge of honor for defiantly not doing so. Now, his jokes make you wince. The soundness of their logic is as intact as ever, but they’re seldom informed by facts or new perspectives. Each visit reminds you that your face is technically capable of laughing and cringing at the same time—but it certainly doesn’t feel good to do so. Despite it all, Uncle Dave insists it’s not that his viewpoints have gotten stale: Everyone’s just gotten so much more sensitive.

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If you at home watching this sh** on Netflix,” says Dave Chappelle in Sticks & Stones, his latest standup special, “remember b****, you clicked on my face.”

It’s a fair warning: In the new one-hour special, Chappelle defends Michael Jackson against charges of child molestation and says state-level abortion restrictions are a misogynist reaction to the #MeToo movement.

The set mostly misses the mark. And what is that mark? The truth. Chappelle remains one of the most vital, and certainly among the most daring, of standups, but we count on him to say unsayable truths, or to bring us closer to truths most of us hadn’t consciously considered, or at least to restate the truth in a clever way. Chappelle doesn’t often strike a facetious pose or hide behind a character; mostly what he says is what he really thinks, as an especially astute observer of the American carnival. Or at least that’s his brand. Preach, Dave.

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I couldn't help but appreciate the fact that, well, this guy will do it; he'll go there.

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