Here’s the story behind the national uproar over Dave Chappelle and First Avenue

Ross Raihala, Pioneer Press
·11 min read
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Dave Chappelle has pushed the Twin Cities into the national spotlight.

This week opened with a last-minute announcement that First Avenue was hosting a Wednesday night show featuring the comedian, one of the most famous and powerful entertainers in the country.

Despite the ticket price of $129.50, there was little doubt the show would sell out and it did, in a matter of minutes. After all, this guy can fill arenas. In November, he headlined Target Center in an evening that included stand-up comedy, a screening of a documentary about Chappelle’s attempts to stage comedy and music events outdoors during the first summer of the pandemic and an impromptu concert featuring Justin Bieber and Usher.

But after a backlash, Chappelle’s Wednesday night show ended up switching locations just hours before showtime and earning national attention. And, fueled by misinformation and in some cases blatant lies, it’s stoked a whole lot of anger and accusations pointed in all directions. The entire affair comes off like a bingo card of hot-button issues including racism, “wokeness,” transgender people and freedom of speech.

I’m going to attempt to lower the temperature and explain just what’s going on here. I’m fully aware I won’t sway the opinions of many who have long since dug in their heels and won’t concede an inch. Instead, consider this an attempt to reach those who know only the headlines.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

First up, Chappelle himself. He built his career in the ’90s through live stand-up and appearances on film and television shows. He was already a known figure in 2003 when Comedy Central hired him to helm “Chappelle’s Show,” a sketch comedy show that made him a superstar.

For the first two seasons, “Chappelle’s Show” took aim at everyone, with the star taking on racial stereotypes, politics and any number of other issues. No one — most notably Black people — was safe from Chappelle’s barbs. That included Minnesota’s own Prince, who later developed a friendship with the comic. The show became a critical and commercial juggernaut and Chappelle was shaping up to become the voice of an entire generation.

But by the time he was filming the third season, a certain rot had set in. As he has explained in interviews over the years, Chappelle realized a significant amount of his audience was not laughing with him but were laughing at him and, by extension, Black people in general.

During a heated June 2004 stand-up show in Sacramento, Calif., Chappelle walked off stage after people in the crowd continued to shout a popular catch phrase from his show, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” He soon returned and said, “The show is ruining my life.” He explained that he worked hard on the show and fought with network executives who told him his audience wasn’t savvy enough to understand what he was doing.

“Every day, I fight for you,” he told the audience. “I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.”

In the midst of filming the third season in 2005, Chappelle took an unannounced trip to South Africa and walked away from his $50 million contract. At the time, he told Time magazine that he wanted to escape from the distractions of fame: “I’m interested in the kind of person I’ve got to become. I want to be well-rounded and the industry is a place of extremes.”

For the next eight years, Chappelle continued to occasionally perform live and appear on TV, but scaled back his overall exposure. In 2013, he returned to regular touring. That November, he performed eight shows at First Avenue, which marked the occasion by painting his name on one of the famed stars outside the building. It’s an honor reserved for the most notable names to play the venue.

Netflix hired Chappelle to shoot a series of stand-up specials that now stand among the most-watched content on the streaming service. The company reportedly paid the comedian $24.1 million for “The Closer,” which debuted in October. Chappelle has said it’ll be his last stand-up special for the foreseeable future.

But the arrival of “The Closer” brought the focus back on Chappelle’s jokes about LGBTQ people — particularly transgender people — which had become more and more prominent in recent years. Critics said his jokes were increasingly pointed, even mean, and yet Chappelle doubled down on his stance at every turn. His supporters, meanwhile, maintained that the jokes were taken out of context and thus lost a lot of the nuances of his performance as a whole. Chappelle’s fans also complained that the comic targeted all sorts of people and that trans people should just learn to laugh at themselves.

TRANSGENDER ISSUES

Speaking as a gay man with some insight into the trans community, I can tell you trans people are continually told they are bad, they are wrong and/or they are mentally ill. Many trans people first hear those comments from their own mind. They feel they were born into the wrong body, that their identity doesn’t match their body parts. They can start out with a baseline of shame, fear and confusion long before the world at large chimes in with their own opinions.

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According to the LGBTQ nonprofit OutFront Minnesota, queer youth are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their straight peers, and suicide rates are highest in trans teens. Violence against trans people is at an all-time high in 2022, a year that’s seen more than 300 anti-queer bills introduced around the country, including measures banning trans youth in sports matching their gender and restricting health care for trans people.

On one hand, Chappelle is free to make jokes about anyone and everything. His outspokenness is key to his popularity. On the other hand, trans people are also free to say they’re tired of being targeted by his jokes, which can fuel violence against them.

Both sides here make perfectly valid points that happen to be at odds. Here’s where First Avenue comes into the picture.

FIRST AVENUE

For decades, the former bus depot has served as a gathering place for music lovers. Prince helped make it world-famous after shooting much of his 1984 breakthrough film “Purple Rain” in and around the club. It struggled at times over the years, but remained a relative rarity as a club of its size and stature that has remained independently owned.

In the time since current president and CEO Dayna Frank took over in 2009, First Avenue has expanded into a mini-empire. In addition to making long-overdue renovations in its main room and adjacent 7th Street Entry, Frank has purchased the nearby Fine Line as well as the Turf Club and Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. First Avenue also operates St. Paul’s Palace Theatre with the Chicago-based Jam Productions.

First Avenue was set to celebrate 50 years in the business in 2020 when the pandemic forced its stages to go dark. Frank went on to help found the National Independent Venue Association, which successfully lobbied lawmakers to pass the Save Our Stages Act, helping live venues of all sorts navigate through a financially devastating year.

But 2020 was about more than the pandemic. The murder of George Floyd led the venue — along with other music and arts presenters around the country — to reconsider its position in regard to ensuring a more equal playing field for people of all races. On top of that, the year saw a resurgence of the #MeToo movement in the local music scene, with women sharing stories of sexual misconduct among Twin Cities musicians, venue employees and fans.

To make it clear where First Avenue stands, management published a code of conduct for its venues meant to create and maintain “an environment in which all are treated with dignity and respect, free from discrimination and harassment.” It applies to audience members, employees and performers and specifically forbids “acting or speaking in a discriminatory manner or using racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic or other biased language, including intentional misgendering.”

When fans buy tickets to First Avenue events online, they are required to acknowledge and agree to the code of conduct, which can be found in full on the venue’s website.

So when First Avenue announced the Chappelle performance Monday afternoon, it was flooded with criticism for the booking, not from a rabid pack of culture warriors, but largely from the very people who attend its shows and perform on its stages. Yes, they called out Chappelle for his transphobic humor. But they also pointed out that, by the club’s own rules, Chappelle shouldn’t be allowed to take the stage.

Management refused to speak to the media, but the controversy raged on. Tuesday morning, the show sold out quickly and Chappelle announced two additional shows, which expanded to four, at the Varsity Theater, a smaller club in Dinkytown operated by mega-promoter Live Nation.

The discussion, online and off, continued as First Avenue remained silent. First Avenue is a special place, people argued, owned and run by people who live in the Twin Cities, not faceless international corporate entities with headquarters far, far away. And under Frank, who herself is married to a woman, the nightclub has become an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ people.

Internally, LGBTQ employees and supporters began expressing their reservations to management. MPR News spoke to several trans employees, including Spencer Gosewisch, who called the move a slap in the face: “They say that companies hang up queer flags in June and burn them in July, and that’s exactly what it feels like First Avenue is doing right now.”

Had Chappelle simply booked all his shows at the Varsity from the start, the outcry surely wouldn’t have been so strong. What upset so many people was that this was First Avenue, a venue that seemed to be saying one thing and doing another.

NATIONAL NEWS

Late Wednesday afternoon, just hours before showtime, First Avenue announced it would not host Chappelle and that the show was moving to the Varsity. “To staff, artists and our community, we hear you and we are sorry,” read the statement posted to social media. “We know we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, and we know we let you down. We are not just a black box with people in it, and we understand that First Ave. is not just a room, but meaningful beyond our walls.”

That statement instantly transformed the week’s events into national news. Far-right Twitter figures pushed their own takes on the controversy, stoking an avalanche of voices into the online conversation. And everyone was mad at someone — at First Avenue, at Chappelle, at his supporters or his critics.

So what happens next? Life, and business, will go on. Assuming he doesn’t add more shows, Chappelle will have performed for five sold-out audiences with some fresh material. (Critics say Chappelle has slowly evolved from somewhat traditional stand-up routines to more self-reflexive monologues where he fights back at his detractors.)

Chappelle will be fine. He’ll leave the Twin Cities with a nice paycheck to add to his vast fortune. He’ll continue to work as much, or as little, as he pleases and the only way he’ll truly get canceled is if he chooses to cancel himself.

As for First Avenue, it has weathered plenty in the past and it’ll likely weather this as well. Yes, the club has earned an army of people who now hate the place. But those same people have never been inside and would never have gone there anyway. The venue has probably lost a few longtime fans, but the thing about entertainment is that it’s always changing. While some careers — the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney — have lasted more than 50 years, there’s always a new generation of both performers and audience members adding themselves into the mix.

After writing all of these words, I found a particularly smart response in a reader’s comment left for the Star Tribune’s review of Wednesday’s show, when Chappelle reportedly expressed sympathy for the children of some First Avenue staffers who had been threatened, but also ridiculed protesters outside the Varsity as “transgender lunatics,” criticized a woman in the front row for wearing a mask and called monkeypox a “gay disease.”

“Nothing about that sounds interesting or funny,” the reader wrote. “I’ve watched his specials and I see someone who needed more time off from performing to really figure out who to talk about. Transgender issues and monkeypox shouldn’t be off limits (nothing should), but making fun of them versus the folks treating them as less than isn’t funny, it’s lazy. Plenty of hypocrites, racists, bigots and general ignorance to skewer out there. No need to add to it.”

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