Dave Chappelle's still joking about trans people

Comic doubles down with his new special

Dave Chappelle has doubled down on targeting transgender people in in his new Netflix special, saying: ‘I love punching down.’

The comedian returned to his favoured – if always controversial –subject in his newest special, The Dreamer, which debuted on the streaming service yesterday.

He starts the show by telling a story about visiting Jim Carrey on set of the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic Man On The Moon, where the actor famously stayed in character even when the cameras weren’t rolling.

Chappelle recalls: ‘I was very disappointed because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey and I had to pretend he was Andy Kaufman all afternoon. It was clearly Jim Carrey. I could look at him and clearly see it was Jim Carrey.’ He then added: 'That's how trans people make me feel.’

At another point he said that if he was ever to be convicted of a crime he would say: ‘Before you sentence me, I want the court to know I identify as a woman. Send me to a woman’s jail.’

He added: ‘As soon I get in there, you know what I’mma be doing. "Give me your fruit cocktail, bitch, before I knock your motherfucking teeth out. I’m a girl, just like you, bitch. Come here and suck this girl dick I got. Don’t make me explain myself. I’m a girl."’

Speaking about the backlash he gets for such material, he explained: ‘If you guys came here to this show tonight thinking that I’m going to make fun of those [transgender] people again, you’ve come to the wrong show. I’m not fucking with those people anymore. It wasn’t worth the trouble.

‘I ain’t saying shit about them. Maybe three or four times tonight, but that’s it. I’m tired of talking about them.

‘And you want to know why I’m tired of talking about them? Because these people acted like I needed them to be funny. Well, that’s ridiculous. I don’t need you. I got a whole new angle coming. You guys will never see this shit coming. I ain’t doing trans jokes no more.’

He then said he was going to transition to joking about ‘handicapped’ people instead because ‘they’re not as organised as the gays. And I love punching down.’

True to his promise he then spoke about meeting a paraplegic and then ‘just walked away. I wanted him to see me do something he couldn't do. I skipped.’

Chappelle also said he had been ‘trying to repair my relationship with the transgender community cause I don’t want them to think that I don’t like them’.

He said his answer was to write a play – ‘because I know that gays love plays’ – about a ‘Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n***a. It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play she dies of loneliness cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. It’s sad.’

The material inevitably provoked a backlash on social media – as well as supporters saying those who dislike the material should simply not watch.

Podcaster Scott Wampler wrote: ‘I think it's extremely weird and probably telling (in a way that only a shrink could unpack) that Dave Chappelle, one of the sharpest comedians to ever stand on a stage, is still out here antagonizing trans folks. Hard to reckon with what a disappointment he has turned out to be.