"He Was Such a Gentleman."

Dave Chappelle’s been in the news for a couple weeks now because of his investment in a 19th century schoolhouse in his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, which he restored and leased to the town’s public radio station, WYSO. Hence his interview with NPR a couple weeks ago (the subject of this newsletter) and another interview with PBS this past week:

One thing that caught my attention in these interviews was Chappelle’s apparent dodging of questions about WYSO’s editorial independence. When NPR asked how he’d respond if the station reported on his business interests, he said he’d cross that bridge when they come to it. When PBS asked about the station’s editorial independence, he said he didn’t know if he’d ever discussed the issue with WYSO, and he hoped they’d be nicer to him than other outlets have been. 

Chappelle also stressed in both interviews that he considers his relationship with WYSO to be a “church and state” situation. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything deeper to his equivocation—especially because WYSO’s General Manager, Luke Dennis, gave PBS a different answer than Chappelle, adamantly stating that the station is “utterly independent from Dave Chappelle.” And obviously the comedian has long harbored a hostility to the press: remember that in his 2021 special The Closer, he traces his transphobia all the way back to 2005, when “one of the gay papers” in the Bay Area reported on “some transgender jokes” he did at an Oakland club:

[T]his was the first time that the trans community ever got mad at me that I knew about. And then I was nobody, I had just quit Chappelle Show. It was like a nothing hole in the wall club and I was doing some transgender jokes in Oakland, it was 16 years ago. My pronoun game was not as nice as it is today. I went too far, I said things like “tranny” and shit, I didn’t know these words were bad, and a woman stood up and just gave me the business. Started screaming at me, and I’m sure it was a woman. But she kept calling me transphobic and all this shit I had never even heard these words before, it was really weird. I didn’t trip, I just gazed at security to look like, “Go on, get that bitch out of here.”

I kept it moving. And then she went to the press. The next day one of the gay papers wrote all of the same things she had said to me, about me in the paper. Misquoted the jokes and was calling me “transphobic” you know, these words, I had never heard them before but every time that I talked with anybody from the community since they always repeat the talking points from that article. My least favorite of which being, I hate this phrase they say, I was punching down on them. “Punching down,” what the fuck does that mean? 

I reached out to Dennis at WYSO to figure out what to make of the discrepancy between his position and Chappelle’s. He assured me that editorial independence has been a part of “every single conversation going back almost five years” with Chappelle, and that the station would never have entered into a 15-year lease with him absent a guarantee that he wouldn’t interfere in its editorial discussions. He also stressed that Chappelle did not directly invest in the donor-supported station—just in the facility, which WYSO is leasing—and that he hasn’t donated to it in over a decade. 

Dennis also told me that his own team was caught off guard by Chappelle’s comments in the PBS interview. “My news director called me right away and was like, ‘Why would he make a joke about that?’” he said. “The part where he was like, ‘Well, I hope they’d be a little nicer to me.’ It’s like, no, dude, we’re not gonna be nicer to you, because our independence is the thing that our donors donate for.” 

I was relieved to hear this; the last thing we need right now is another mega-rich person turning the news media into his personal plaything. Here’s hoping Joe Rogan doesn’t get any ideas. 

Speaking of Joe Rogan, our friend Christina Pazsitzky just played a weekend of shows at the Comedy Mothership. Here’s what she and Tom Segura had to say about it: 

Pazsitzky: It’s so much fun. The crowds were great. I made a trans friend in the front row. 

Segura: That’s cool. That’s unique.  

Pazsitzky: We're gonna have coffee and she's gonna tell me about how she became from a man to a lady. 

Segura: That's interesting. 

Pazsitzky: I know. I'm so curious because she's a hot one. She's not a—

Segura: Not the one where you're like, “You need a consultant.”

Pazsitzky: Yeah, not like last week. What's his name?

Segura: That's one of the things on the Tok sometimes, where you just see a guy. A guy in just heels and a dress and he's just like, “I feel strong. I feel good today.” And you're like, “Oof. Jesus Christ. Oh my God.” And then people are like, “You look beautiful. Thank you.” 

Pazsitzky: Yeah, it's like a dude, like you in heels and a tight pencil skirt. There's that guy in the UK.

Segura: I mean, I'm just shaking my head at the fact that I don't know how somebody who has not worn heels can wear heels. 

Pazsitzky: It's so hard. 

Segura: I don't understand. 

Pazsitzky: I can barely—I'm 50 and I still can't walk in them. It's so hard. 

Shocker: these people are still huge transphobes. Elsewhere, Segura went on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant and discussed the 2021 episode of his own podcast with the sex trafficker Andrew Tate, whom he described as an entertaining, polite, and normal guest:

Segura: The way that Tate actually first became a thing was these clips where he was sort of misogynistic and rude, but it felt very performative.

Schulz: Yeah, it was like a character.

Segura: Yeah. And you could see it. He was like, "When a woman brings me coffee in the morning, she should bring me two cups of coffee. If one isn't warm enough or if I finish it, I want my second one there." And we were like, "This is fucking ridiculous." "When they say, 'Do you want still or sparkling water?' I always drink sparkling water. Still water's for poor people." So we would play this and comment the same way we comment on the tailor clips.

I remember he had one and he was like—something about paying—and he was like, "Yeah, I bring out my card because it never gets denied." And then people were like, "You mean overdraft protection?" I'm like, "Everybody has that." We would just roast him and play this very silly thing that I was like, "Yeah, this guy's saying this thing that has an angle to it, but this feels deliberate."

"He was such a gentleman. You're like, 'Oh, you're a smart guy. And this is your thing.'"

Schulz: Schtick.

Segura: There was a performative aspect to it. So somehow, some way, I don't remember the thing, it was like he was coming to the states and he agreed to come on. I was like, "That guy? Dude, that's amazing." So he came on and he was an A-level guest.

Schulz: Yeah, yeah. I remember even Christina being charmed by it.

Segura: Dude, I remember at one point—because he was saying all this stuff, he was like—dude, this one thing he said, people were like, "Wouldn't you get bored of a woman that just does everything you say?" It was a rhetorical question, and he was like, "Bitch. Of course I'm not gonna get—" I had a coffee, but I spit my coffee everywhere. And she was laughing hysterically. And we left there—first of all, he was such a gentleman. [Ed. note: it wasn't rhetorical. Pazsitsky earnestly said she was worried men wouldn't respect her if she's too submissive.]

Schulz: Sweetheart. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Segura: You're like, "Oh, you're a smart guy. And this is your thing."

"He was super nice. And he was very funny on the show."

Schulz: You're also looking at it through comedian lenses where we've seen archetypes like this pass through.

Segura: A thousand percent.

Schulz: And it's like, "Okay, this is another internet personality and there's a little schtick there.

Segura: And you actually go like, "I've seen this archetype, and this is a very refined version of this," because he actually would dance between exaggeration and pure, well-formed logical—

Schulz: Philosophy.

Segura: Yeah, very philosophical, very articulate.

Schulz: Yeah.

Segura: We're like, "This guy's a great guest." Several months later, his name and everything starts getting bigger and then people are saying all these things about him—

Schulz: You make him a star.

Segura: I make him a star. It's my birthday and I'm doing this show in Chicago and it's on my birthday. And I did not know that they had put together a montage of people saying happy—so I finished my show, they wheel out a cake and they have the screen and it's just like comedians. It's just like Bert and Sebastian and Joe. Everyone would be like, "Happy birthday. Happy birthday." And it just cuts to him and he's saying happy birthday, and it's the day after he's accused of trafficking, right? And I'm, again, drinking, I think I'm drinking a beer, and I'm like [spit take]. And I'm like, "Guys, he's wanted." And everybody after then was like, "Yes, you put him on, you platformed him." And I was like, yeah, we had him on as a entertaining guest. And he was super nice. And he was very funny on the show.

"This is another internet personality and there's a little schtick there."

Schulz: Sometimes it goes wrong when you have entertaining guests on the pod.

Segura: Yeah. Yeah.

Schulz: I mean, we would know nothing about that at all.

Segura: No, you've never had somebody come on that something happened later.

Gagnon: Has he reached out to you? Have you talked to him at all?

Segura: We emailed a couple times. He was like, "I'm coming to do another American tour," or whatever. It was well after, but I don't think he ever came or anything. But it was a perfectly polite—

Schulz: Exchange.

Segura: Yeah. Just totally normal.

You’d think there might be some expression of regret or even baseline acknowledgement of the fact that Tate is under investigation for rape and sex trafficking, including the trafficking of children, in six countries. Well, guess again: he was a sweet, normal guy, and it’s just so funny that Segura had him on the podcast before he really blew up. 

(Let’s not overlook that riff about Schulz & Co.’s experience with guests whom “something happened [with] later.” I suspect they’re referring to Alex Jones, who appeared on Flagrant twice in 2021—the second appearance following YouTube’s removal of the first. Notably, the Flagrant crew did invite Jones on before he courted controversy, but long after, and obviously it was his controversiality that drew them to him. Like Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon, they don’t think what Jones did was all that bad, and anyway he’s a smart funny guy.) 

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I do think it’s worth spelling out what happened here, because it’s illustrative of so much. Segura and Pazsitsky used to make fun of Tate’s videos, which they thought were an act. (This much is true, though I think it’s telling that they found the act funny.) Then they invited him on their podcast, where he thoroughly charmed them… by playing the role of a hateful misogynist creep. In the years since, it turned out that Tate wasn’t putting on an act at all, and that Segura had actually lent his credibility to an internationally wanted sex predator. Nonetheless, Segura cannot help but speak admiringly of him in retrospect. 

Do you know what this reminds me of? Colin Jost’s reflections on SNL’s 2015 episode with then-candidate Donald Trump. As I summarized them in my essay about Jost’s memoir back in 2020: 

In a chapter defending Lorne Michaels’ decision to book Donald Trump, he insists that no one in late 2015 took Trump all that seriously. Everyone knew he was a Democrat (never mind that he was running as a Republican on a reactionary, xenophobic platform), and no one expected he would do the things he was saying (was the saying part not bad enough?). Plus, Trump is charming in person. He didn’t come with a security detail, and when he first walked into Jost’s office he complimented Jost’s looks. “By the end of the week,” Jost writes, “I think most people at our show thought, Huh. This guy isn’t a monster after all.”

Both instances are revealing of a failing endemic among comedians: their utter defenselessness in the face of charming sociopaths. (I mean, I personally don’t find Trump or Tate charming, but clearly other people do.) With apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, I think these episodes also illustrate a common failure to recognize that people are who they pretend to be. It takes a certain type of personality to make a living spewing hate on the internet, and it’s usually not the type who actually thinks what they’re saying is bad. Somehow—and I can only wonder why—so many comedians are completely unable to see this.

I will leave you with Joe Rogan boasting once again that hate speech works: 

James McCann: I think the trans thing is done in the schools. 

Rogan: Yeah, it's dropped off significantly. 

McCann: I had really—because we were homeschooling and I was just aware because my dad's a teacher and he would say—I don't want to get him in trouble—but he would report that the numbers were developing. And I think as a social phenomenon, it seems to have like—now everyone just says they have an anxiety disorder. 

Rogan: Well, you know when it dropped off noticeably? 

McCann: When? 

Rogan: When Elon bought Twitter. 

McCann: We just stopped pumping the content to say it's good. 

Rogan: Well, all of a sudden you could say whatever you wanted. 

McCann: Yeah. 

Rogan: And so you could make fun of it now. And then people realize, oh, this is a completely falsely propped up narrative.

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