Comedian Dave Chappelle seems to have had a change of heart this week when it comes to his transphobia, blaming Republicans for taking his jokes out of context. But not even Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who’s not particularly known for her intelligence, is buying it.

Chappelle’s Netflix special, The Closer, aired in 2021, well after the current moral panic about trans people existing was already underway. States were already passing anti-trans laws banning trans people from getting gender-affirming health care and banning trans kids from participating in school sports with their friends, Meanwhile, Chappelle was laughing with audiences about trans people’s genitals: He declared himself a “team TERF” (trans exclusionary radical feminist) and said he supported J.K. Rowling, who spends all day posting on social media about how much she dislikes trans people.

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That is, the political environment of 2021 was already very hostile to trans people, and that’s the moment he decided to turn up the dial on his transphobic humor. A cynical person might say that it’s less likely that his jokes were misused by Republicans and more likely that he was trying to use the Republican-dominated political environment to boost his own career.

And this wasn’t a few off-color jokes in one special. This was a years-long, one-man anti-trans campaign. He long had a reputation for transphobia, so much so that a year before The Closer even came out, Bob the Drag Queen was already calling Chappelle out in interviews for his tendency to “punch down” at trans women.

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After The Closer was released, Chappelle took to social media to complain about Netflix, whining about how he’s “the only one that can’t go to the office anymore” (after trans and nonbinary Netflix workers organized a walkout) and telling trans people he is “not bending to anybody’s demands.” None of these statements was intended as a joke, despite his now saying that he was just joking the whole time.

In 2022, Chappelle opened for comedian John Mulaney at an Ohio show and made homophobic and transphobic jokes. One of those jokes was about how he was attacked by a homeless man and said that he thought that person was transgender because he was confused about whether his weapon was a knife or a gun.

At another show that year, he invited anti-trans billionaire Elon Musk on stage with him in San Francisco. When people booed, Chappelle mocked his audience for being poor.

In 2023, he visited Congress and had his picture taken with Rep. Boebert, one of the most anti-LGBTQ+ members of Congress, and Rep. Ana Paulina Luna (R-FL). Boebert tweeted the picture with the words, “Just three people who understand that there’s only two genders.”

In 2024, he released a new Netflix special, The Dreamer, where he continued to mock trans people, compared the use of trans people’s correct pronouns to racial slurs, and joked about wanting to pretend to be a trans woman to go to women’s prison.

Just last year, he said that he was going to tell anti-trans jokes in his Saturday Night Live monologue, but that show’s producers wouldn’t let him.

And now Chappelle is complaining about that Boebert picture. Republicans, he claims, took his jokes too seriously. They were just jokes!

“I did resent that the Republican Party ran on transgender jokes,” he told NPR this week.

Boo hoo.

“You know, I felt like they were doing a weaponized version of what I was doing. That’s not what I was doing.”

Boo hoo hoo.

He went on to talk about that infamous picture with Boebert and said that, at age 49, after having spent his entire adult life in showbiz, he didn’t know that he could just say no when someone asked to take a picture with him.

“I had already taken 40 pictures [that day]. I didn’t want to say no in front of everybody, but I didn’t know the phrase ‘I respectfully decline.’ So I just took the picture,” he said.

Chappelle doesn’t just think that his audience is poor. He also thinks they’re as stupid.

And, evidently, stupider than Lauren Boebert, because not even she’s buying it, and she’s willing to believe all sorts of dumb things.

“I don’t think I used his joke, though,” Boebert told TMZ this week, pointing out that Chappelle’s complaints don’t even make sense.

“You’re a comedian, be a little tougher,” she went on. “People say things about me all the time. I go in my comment section. Do you think I sit at home and cry about it, and just wait for NPR to show up and have a counseling session with them?”

While Chappelle wants us to believe that everything he said about trans people was a joke and that he’s just a clown whose words simply cannot affect the reality that other people have to live in, he does at times seem completely capable of understanding that jokes are often based on an understanding of reality and that those jokes can be used to share and promote that understanding.

Chappelle ended Chappelle’s Show after he abruptly left for South Africa while filming its third season. He told Time that one thing that contributed to his departure was when he noticed a white member of the audience was laughing too hard at a sketch in which Chappelle wore blackface and tried to convince Black people to perform certain stereotypes. He thought the sketch was funny, but he said that white man’s laughter made him “uncomfortable.”

“As a matter of fact, that was the last time I shot before I told myself, ‘I gotta take f**king time out after this,’ because my head almost exploded,” he said.

Jokes are based on a context, and they can be used to reify and communicate that context. Joking about how trans people are liars spreads the idea that trans people are liars.

Republicans didn’t use his jokes at all. They were already running on transphobia well before The Closer was released. If anything, Chappelle took their political worldview and turned it into fodder for comedy.

And now even Lauren Boebert is making fun of him for being a whiny celebrity who can’t take criticism for his actions. It must be tough being more fragile than a Republican member of Congress.

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