Take a Joke, Not a Hit: What The Will-Smith-Copy-Cat Attack of Dave Chappelle Means for the Comedy World Today

Comedian Dave Chappelle was attacked while performing at the Netflix is a Joke festival.

Attacking a comedian once this year alone was too much; twice is a new kind of ridiculous.

After Chris Rock was slapped in the face by Will Smith during this year's Oscar Awards, comedians, comedy clubs, and various other performance venues began speaking out against violence, remarking that anyone who attempted such a stunt in their venues would be promptly removed from the premises. They warned against copy cat attacks, calling it assault.

(Photo : Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Comedians took to social media pages, expressing concern that there might be more attacks mirroring the one seen at the Oscars. Performers around the world acknowledged the lack of safety they felt, the precedent having been set that, if an audience member does not like what a comedian has said, they can go up and attack the performer.

And everyone laughed this off (pun intended) as an overreaction. Many saw these posts and suggested that people were victimising themselves in light of an event that had nothing to do with them; Regardless of how many people watch the Oscars, the event was between two people so ethereally high in the field that they could not possibly have implications on anyone else. Who would be crazy enough to try to repeat this?

Well...

That was, until Dave Chappelle was attacked on stage at the Hollywood Bowl during the Netflix is a Joke festival out in California. An audience member stormed the stage, tackling Chappelle to the ground during his set. This was not simply a hand-to-hand physical attack - the audience member had with him a fake gun that, when the trigger was pulled, realeased a blade.

No one is laughing anymore. In just over a month, two different comedians have been attacked while on stage during their set. This copycat attack confirms that the actions of Will Smith, while admonished by most, were, in fact, absorbed by many.

Comedy must not be transformed into a medium in which certain audience members are on edge, quite literally primed to come to blows if they do not like a joke that is said.

This is in no way, shape, or form a commentary on whether or not certain people should be allowed to say certain things on stage. With an understanding and a respect to fellow people, it is important not to belittle anyone's quality of life or personhood, regardless of whether or not you were, in fact, "kidding."

However, violence is also never the answer to something like that.

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A comedian's job is to make jokes. To push the envelope. To give the world a way to cope with unfortunate things through finding a uniting means through which to laugh about the absurdity of the human condition. If we are no longer allowed to laugh at life, everything will be instantly suffocated in a cloud of misery.

I know that sounds dramatic. I don't think it is.

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Comedy is a coping mechanism. While therapists may advise against using it as a deflection when discussing the personal processing of emotions, as a universal society, coping through laughter is synonymous with survival.

People most often make jokes about the things that hurt them the hardest, affected them the most. Getting other people to laugh with you shows the comedian and the world that they are not alone - a salve for some of your worst pain.

An excellent example of this is Hannah Gadsby's Netflix special Nanette. In it, she discusses different traumas she was made to face growing up and during her adult life, and she gives the audience an avenue through which to laugh about it and heal through it. It shows a world of people who have experienced similar things that they are not alone.

Nanette, of course, is unique for a comedy special due to its powerful ending (which I will not spoil for you! Go and watch Nanette now if you haven't!)

As we exit this pandemic, a time in which we have been more separated as people than we have been ever before, finding ways to laugh together will be what re-connects us. Laughing through our shared traumas has the potential to heal the world.

Bo Burnham made a similar point of uniting and laughing with people during a troubling time. Inside, the musical special he made during the height of the pandemic, served as a comedic mirror to the struggles and unavoidable miseries that we all, in some way or other, faced during this time. There were plenty of people who could find no humor in this bleak one-man show - but those who did have said, time and time again, that the sympathy they found in Bo's despairing lyrics saved them from a devestating sense of being alone.

Comedy is a vehicle through which we can take the tragedy and hardship we are experiencing, and find a way to laugh at it and find community through it.

However, a comedian's job cannot be done - the envelope cannot be pushed in the important and world-healing way it needs to be - if the performer is worried that the wrong joke will get them physically harmed.

No one should have to do their job with that as a concern. It adds a level of fear to a facet of entertainment that is supposed to give us a reprieve from fear and negative emotions.

(Photo : Getty)

So, regardless of how you feel about Dave Chappelle, please understand that no one should be attacked while they are on stage, doing their job.

If you have plans to go see a comedy show, maybe check that all of your friends are on the same page about not attacking the performer that you've come to see. That might be a cool and fun thing to be on the same page about.