 with Kevin Fallon Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
This Week:
That Chappelle Special… What's the Point? The thing that people who decry cancel culture often miss is that the examples they use are people who haven't actually been canceled. It drives me crazy.
Kevin Hart? We had a conversation about the pain words he used caused, and then he went on to continue to make millions of dollars in movies and TV series. But there is still this idea that he was "canceled" because we had a discussion about how he used the platform that, because he's a multi-million dollar movie star, he felt he was entitled to have without consequence. More and more, though, that's the thing: without consequence.
 This has been on my mind ever since I watched, and was baffled by, Dave Chappelle's new Netflix special The Closer. This is a newsletter about the things I can't stop thinking about, and this week it's the brilliant Craig Jenkins column in Vulture that debates Chappelle's role as a cultural provocateur—especially in context of this new special.
This is a special that acknowledges the past criticism Chappelle has received for homophobic and transphobic jokes, and then doubles down on them like that aforementioned entitlement. As if we're not evolved enough—or maybe even "too woke"—to get a joke. Or understand that the joke is in pursuit of a heightened observation about culture. Or that the criticism doesn't matter because he doesn't value social media and online critics as a valid entity. Or whatever.
It's all dressed up in "I get it/you don't" drag.
"Any of you who have ever watched me know that I have never had a problem with transgender people. If you listen to what I'm saying, clearly, my problem has always been with white people," he says at one point. (A false equivalence between the LGBTQ community and people of color is a favorite refrain of his.) "I'm team TERF!" he exclaims in a sequence defending J.K. Rowling, invoking the term for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or feminists who are transphobic and do not believe trans women are women.
He addresses the LGBTQ community that has taken him to task over past jokes. The false equivalence and the idea that there are actual repercussions for being transphobic or homophobic return, though from a place of grace: "All I ask of your community, with all humility: Will you please stop punching down on my people?"
Cancel culture isn't real, but the demand to learn is. And that's where people like Dave Chappelle fall short. They place the anxiety on opportunity, instead of the point of view and how that reverberates through society. That marquee punchline in The Closer—"my people"—centers around the controversy over rapper DaBaby, who gave a deeply homophobic speech rife with misinformation about AIDS and then was called out for being wrong to do so.
The idea is that we're so sensitive that artists can no longer express themselves, because if they go too close to the line then paranoid queers will join arms and make it so they can never work again. Not only do they always work again, but that's such a bad-faith interpretation of what these discussions are about that it's almost laughable a person being paid tens of millions of dollars to opine on Netflix makes it his mission statement.
It's not a judgement or assumption on how Chappelle feels for allies to be annoyed by this. My colleague Cheyenne Roundtree spoke to the family of Daphne Dorman, the late transgender comedian who Chappelle talks about in The Closer, who took her own life in 2019. The family is outraged at accusations that Chappelle is transphobic or homophobic. That is important, especially given the discourse—and backlash—he is receiving following the special. But even with that, I'm struggling to understand the value of what he does in The Closer.
Is he whining? That's a juvenile, reactionary distillation of it. In some regard, yes, he is displeased that what he felt were enlightened thoughts about the trans and LGBTQ community were being pilloried by those who "didn't get it." It's lame that he would devote an act to people who "don't get it," but, in some respects, that's what he's doing. More than that, though, he's trying to prove that the why—the why you didn't get it—is still more interesting than your offense or anger.
 I'll defer to Jenkins' excellent column for more on this: "In Chappelle's eyes, these are examples of the mountain-moving power of LGBTQ rage. This framing ignores how each one's stubbornness in the face of backlash for the awful thing they said only led to more awfulness, how these are stories about refusing to budge when asked for a meager concession by fans who want to support, how each one still sits on the same mountain of cash."
Look, I acknowledge my own bitterness when it comes to this Chappelle shit. The last time I tried to engage thoughtfully with his comedy and its potential for cultural enlightenment, I received death threats in comments on Instagram posts of my then-newborn nephews. It's impossible to interrogate any of this because the fandom has racehorse blinders on.
In the years since The Chappelle Show launched, we have coronated him not just as a brilliant comedian, but a cultural arbiter. Therefore his musings aren't just profound, they're indisputable. We do that often for comedians. They tell a joke that's relatable about how we feel about airplane peanuts, and suddenly they speak on behalf of the entire human experience. (I'm being glib, but the point is there.)
Chappelle's whole thing is saying the things we're not supposed to say, let alone think, and then making us consider what it says about us that we quiet those parts of ourselves. But what if those things don't actually have value when they're articulated? What if they're just, at face value, wrong?
Maid Is Such Good TV In my years as an entertainment journalist and critic, I have passionately abided by the idea that art is a capsule of the mood and feeling of a certain time. And therefore I have no notes about the current television moment, which seems to be screaming: Wow, it really sucks to be alive, huh?
The Squid Game of it all is its own conversation. But we're finally interacting with a real world in which systems make it impossible to be a human person. This all sounds casual and snarky, yet it's real—and the reason we're all returning to the dormant instinct of watching en masse, as a monoculture, and then unloading about it. That thing on Netflix isn't just entertaining us, it's speaking to us. And we need to speak about it.
There's the ways in which we all, unfortunately, understand the motivations of the characters in Squid Game. It's why those explosive moments in Midnight Mass have sat with us in the time since we watched, in a real, contemplative way. And it's why Maid, I think, has become somewhat of a surprise hit.  It's not genre at all, so there's no "why the horror analogy of Maid gives me all the feels" BuzzFeedology to be argued. The series is so clear-eyed and raw that I'm shocked that so many people seem, in the week since it premiered, to have rallied around it.
Margaret Qualley stars as a twenty-something woman who had a child with her boyfriend (Nick Robinson, fantastic and unrecognizable from his Love, Simon days) during a period of bliss, but now is recognizing him as a violent and manipulative captor. The best thing about her is her instinct to escape, which she does. The horrifying thing is that society won't let her.
Alex, Qualley's character, is a person whose eyes are darting back and forth in a constant state of confusion, processing the overwhelming information she's receiving and how she could possibly take it in while still giving attention to her two-year-old girl. What makes Maid work is that it's such a human story, but it's also a story about systems.
Everything—the paperwork, the police protocol, the job market, generational influence, and, again, the paperwork—make it so that, at her most vulnerable and endangered, the only rational thing to do to survive is to go back to the man who she fled in the first place. It's not a pedantic or patronizing "look at how we treat women in this society" diatribe, but an unflinching and harrowing look at how we actually treat women in this society. Specifically, poor women.
Maid is a superhero story, in that we watch Alex find the fortitude to navigate those systems that make it impossible for her to survive, let alone succeed. But it's also a condemnation of those superheroes. Why should anyone need to be that great, that superhuman, in order to have a home, care for her daughter, find a job, and be without abuse in her life?
This is one of those "star is born" performances from Qualley, made even more potent that Andie MacDowell, her mother in real life, also plays her mom—and source of generational trauma—in this. It's probably the best work of MacDowell's career (spoken by a person who watches Four Weddings and a Funeral three times a year).
It's trivializing to say that you can relate to this show, given the hell that women in Alex's position are actually put through. But the ways in which you feel for her, I think, can only be good for us.
The World's Worst Humblebrag The Super Bowl-eventizing of the Erika Jayne-Tom Girardi saga has become increasingly grotesque as this season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills unfolds, documenting Erika's reaction to being accused of complicity in her ex-husband's fleecing of millions from widows and orphans his law firm represented.
That said, inject any and all Erika Jayne drama directly into my veins. I need it. It's how I thrive.
The reason for this existential crisis is the just-released trailer for the four-part—as in four hours, across four weeks—cast reunion, in which Erika is, in moderator Andy Cohen's own words, put "on a skewer" while he fires "up the barbecue."  The trailer is delicious. It telegraphs that not only is Erika going to finally be asked seriously—not at a fancy dinner where castmates are more concerned about friend politics than the truth—what she knew about Tom's misdeeds, but also seems to call her out for manipulating that truth on TV for damage control. Juicy!!!
I would be so into all of this, if not for how Erika shared the trailer on social media. "The champ is here. Me," Erika posted on her Instagram. It echoes her reaction to the announcement that, for the first time, the RHOBH reunion would be four episodes: "Now what would make it four parts? Me."
It's the most fucked-up humblebrag in the history of social media.
Yes, the reunion is four parts because people whose family members died in a horrible plane crash were then robbed of their settlement money because the lawyer in charge took those millions and funnelled them into a trash pop star's glam budget and, now, viewers can't tell exactly what that star is lying about while on a reality TV show talking about it. It is all because of you. Good for you, girl.
Hello. It's Me. Crying. Again. It is only a brief break I have taken to write this newsletter, following the release of about 15 seconds of Adele's new song, after days of just staring out my window contemplatively.  People have been joking about not being emotionally stable enough to listen to what will surely be a devastating new album from the singer, written and produced following her divorce. But I wonder if this album will actually be uplifting. A track list of all club bangers? Adele's disco era?
Because here's the thing: As anyone who has gone through a traumatic break up knows, all you want is your ex to know that you are still talented and also skinny again. Adele has checked both those boxes. This new album? A generous gift to the rest of us.
We're All Searching for Our Stoolmate  These are the faces of two people who have pooped sitting next to each other.
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Dave Chappelle’s Pointless Transphobia and Homophobia
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