Deconstructing Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones

How the Critics and SJW’s Are Missing the Point

Comedy is a science, a theory and a hypothesis all rolled into one. For those who grew up on Johnny Carson, the longtime host of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, he was a student at The University of Nebraska where he performed his thesis on comedy. In the most deadpan of deliveries, Carson broke down the mechanics of comedy, for example, the three-roll, where he performed a joke with the subject of two straight setup lines and the third line being the joke. Throughout his career, Carson adhered to that principle as well as other comedians who watched and followed his career. For the most part, the structure of comedy has remained the same based on the Carson Thesis. You can see that every comic has taken Carson’s Thesis and applied it to their actions whether they knew it or not because other comics copy other comics but the structural Carson elements remain in place.

Dave Chappelle is no exception. His comedy is rooted in Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin. At his height, Chappelle was serious real estate. He had a very popular show, commanded unheard of salary prices but then he walked away from it all, shocking his fans and the populous as a whole. No explanation was given although burnout seemed to be the consensus. The Dave Chappelle Show ran from 2003 to 2006. The absence of his comedy was truly felt and the hole couldn’t be filled.


Slowly though, time must have healed Dave as he made his way back into the view of his audience. A little venue here and a little venue there and Dave was getting his sea legs back. Then one day, he popped up a Saturday Night Live as host. Okay, this is going to be fun. What you saw on that night was just a precursor to what he did with his show Sticks & Stones. He told the truth. It was the kind of truth that didn’t necessarily make you feel guilty or ashamed but more of the brutal honesty and slap in the face that you need because you are going down a path that is beseeching with pitfalls and landmines.

If you are to believe the Rotten Tomatoes critics, Netflix’s Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stone is an unmitigated flop. Some say he’s tired, some say he’s low-bar and disappointing. Currently, the critics score on Rotten Tomatoes is 30%. But here is the thing, his audience score sits at 99%. Why the huge disparity? Rotten Tomatoes is not without controversy as I profiled during the Captain Marvel debacle. There have been only a small handful of critics who have reviewed Sticks & Stone as opposed to the thousands of audience members who have seen his special.

Chappelle isn’t some novice, he’s honed his skill on years of stand-up and observation. To a point, if you want to really assess his comedy, let’s take a much more exploratory look into Sticks & Stone. Let’s deconstruct Dave Chappelle. As the show opens up, the camera fades in from black as we hear Chappelle singing Prince’s 1999. It’s a bit haunting because we don’t know what is happening because Chappelle has never done this before. The lights fade up and Dave is on stage and the topic turns to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef. How can you get humor out of a subject like that? But Chappelle does because Bourdain is not the punchline, he is the catalyst to another story that pivots to an old schoolmate of his who was talented and gifted and destined to become rich but instead wind up marrying a woman who subsequently divorced him which led him to wind up working at a Footlocker store dressed like a referee and living with his mother in her basement for the past 10 years. Chappelle had even extolled some advice to his friend, “Save that bitch for later in your life.” His friend didn’t listen. But there was a moral to this story, his friend never thought about killing himself and he believed and held out hope that his situation was only temporary. Was Chappelle telling us that no matter your situation, no matter your station in life, you must always believe in yourself and that things will get better when you give yourself hope?

Chappelle then turns his attention to the audience when he says he has some impressions to do and the crowd claps with approval. He says, who is this, “Duh, if you do anything in your life… you’re finished.” He asks, “Who is that?” Some of the audience respond with Trump but Chappelle surprises them with “No, it’s you.” What he is about to do is open up the topic with this emerging cancel culture before it became so toxic.

Chappelle moves into the molestation claims against Michael Jackson based on the recent documentary on Jackson with two of his accusers. Chappelle has doubts about their claim and points to MacCauley Culkin as a counterpoint. Culkin states that he saw nothing and had no inappropriate interactions with Jackson. For Chappelle’s point of view, Culkin should have been the prize catch if you’re a molester. If there were anyone put off by the topic, he counterpunches with R. Kelly, whom Chappelle figures that he is guilty based on the number of sex-tapes Kelly has produced. Chappelle encourages Kelly to swap out the age of his victim from 14 to 36. This, of course, leads to a punchline that is stellar in its delivery.

He discusses the Kevin Hart hosting debacle with the Oscars. Hart had made a joke about if his son was turning gay how he would respond. This was a ten-year-old joke. But now it became a lightning rod to the gay community as they wanted Hart to apologize for the joke as well as a pound of flesh. Hart said F you and F the Oscars. Hart subsequently went on the talk show circuit and apologized but in Chappelle’s mind, he shouldn’t have. Chappelle told his audience that you are the worst people he tries to entertain in his life. The take away from this exchange is that certain people have made it much harder to do jokes about anything anymore that faves a litmus test now. Nobody is safe and judging by the reaction from critics and SJW’s, Chappelle is not immune.

Here is where his showmanship exudes with confidence as he gets into the topic of the N-Word versus the F word as it depicts the gay community. Chappelle discusses his old show where he was called into Standards & Practices, the censorship wings for the network. Rene, the woman over Standards & Practices, tells Chappelle that he couldn’t use the F-word in the act. He asks why and she responds that he was not gay. He says okay and thinks for a second and says, “But Rene, I’m also not an N-Word.” The takeaway, we have accepted the depiction of blacks in this country as one thing and it still remains the same after 400 years of oppression. No matter how well you do in your station of life, they still see you as the N-Word.

Chappelle now ventures into a field of landmines as he strides into the Alphabet community of LGBTQ-WXYZ. This is no straight man’s land and any hint of derision is met with extreme retribution, just ask Kevin Hart. What Chappelle is highlighting is the splintering of our society where even he sees division within this community.

The #MeToo Movement is also on the radar of Chappelle. He talks about the masturbatory prowess of Louis C.K. that had some measure of that makes sense as Louis did tell the women that he was going to do it and they watched him do it. Chappelle describing it as pancake dripping off the stomach just had me choking with laughter. The takeaway, Louis outed himself on that but he did let them know upfront first and those who stayed and watched, like Sarah Silverman, didn’t seem to mind.

Chappelle brushed on the shooting epidemic in schools and that white parents more than any group should watch their kids closely. He discussed the opioid crisis and brought it back to the crack cocaine scourge and how opioid had affected the white community where crack had effected the black community and how opioids are being treated as a medical epidemic for whites while crack cocaine was a crime for blacks when in truth, they were seen as the same in Chappelle’s mirror. Just say no said Chappelle as a dig to Nancy Reagan’s catch-all slogan for crack cocaine and how ineffectual it was then and is now for the heroin and opioid victims.

Chappelle saved the best for nearly last as he began the discussion with the disgraced actor, Jussie Smollett, that he described as French. Chappelle described how Smollett made claims that he was accosted by two white men wearing MAGA hats and had called him the N-word and F-word, Chappelle said that that doesn’t sound like something two white men would say at 2 in the morning, that sounds like something that he would say. He dug deeper into Smollett’s fabrication when he questioned the notion that these “white” men had a rope. He also made note that the gay community was upset with the black community being homophobic and oddly quiet on this subject. Chappelle points out most astutely and that is because the black community believed he was lying. Yeah, that was consensus because, from the very start, things just didn’t add up or make sense. One, you go out at 2 in the morning in -16-degree weather. Two, you have a hankering for Subway sandwiches. Three, white guys are out at 2 in the morning wearing MAGA hats, have bleach and a rope and know that you’re on Empire, a black show white people tune in by the millions to see. Really, Jussie? Even I don’t watch this show. The take away from this is how social media has turned some of us into desperate attention whores at any cost. Smollett was on a national show but that wasn’t enough to satisfy his need for status. He wanted more fame, more attention, to be a new young voice on social causes as he was given some platforms with his association with Michelle Obama. We haven’t heard the last from all of this.

Chappelle closes out his set with a discussion of his poor childhood and upbringing. He was made fun of in school. There wasn’t enough money for him to go on school field trips. He was so angry that Chappelle exclaimed, “If I had a gun, I’d kill everyone at school.” And so it ends. That last joke was a throwback to an earlier joke on kids and guns in school.

While Chappelle may not be a critic’s choice, his fans have clamored for his material for a long time. One critic calls him a dinosaur. Well, this comic-saurous used some of the techniques discussed in Carson’s Thesis while deploying some elements from Lenny, George, and Richard. The ingredients worked that served up a nice humble pie.