9/26/2023 0 Comments Books by iceberg slim![]() No quarterly earnings report hinges on his participation. There are no overnight ratings for his specials, no benchmarks to hit. He’s still rich (he’s quite fond of mentioning he drives a Porsche), but not the kind of rich that makes one beholden to CEOs or stockholders. He can tour, he can drop Netflix specials, smoke inside, and provoke modern notions of social justice as he sees fit. (Also unlike the sex worker, his idea of being used is being given $50 million to make white people laugh.) Instead of getting deeper in, he got out, and now, in 2018, he’s free. So unlike the sex worker, Chappelle saw through the ruse. It was inadvertent, but once Chappelle realized it, it played a role in his decision to quit. The system he so loathes - the studio heads, the agents, the middle managers, the white writers, like Chappelle’s Show co-creator Neal Brennan, the white fans he was asked to cater to - were, in his mind, the ones that pushed him to make a show he wasn’t proud of anymore. What he killed was a part of himself, as he pandered to the mainstream and reached for the giant payday as he gave white audiences the cover to laugh at edgy racial material without understanding the history or the pain behind the jokes. Well, it’s not a perfect analogy, but Chappelle is the dead man. ![]() But who, in this analogy, was the dead man that almost dragged Chappelle deeper into the Hollywood system he seems to alternately despise and crave approval from? The dead man that she mourned was another part of the trick, used to prey on her humanity. People she believed were helping her were really working to further the lie that she killed a man. She carries on with her pimp, thanks to the pimp’s deception. ![]() (He even makes a point of telling the audience that people often call him a hero to his face.) In the story, the sex worker doesn’t quit. He was a victim, and his choice to quit was heroic. This fits nicely with the way Chappelle characterized his decision earlier in the special. Chappelle is the put-upon sex worker, incapable of giving any more, but having no choice. In his analogy, Viacom and Comedy Central are the pimp, going to extreme lengths to prevent their best earner from attaining true freedom. It’s natural to want to decode what Chappelle is trying to say, to apply literal meaning to what is, in essence, a parable about power dynamics and the cruelty of capitalism. Only her pimp can offer her salvation, and the only way to repay that debt is to keep working. He stages a death and pins the blame on her, the guilt and shame breaking her spirit. The Iceberg Slim story revolves around a sex worker at the natural end of her career, and her pimp, who goes to great lengths to force her, his best earner, into further years of indentured servitude. Dave Chappelle Is Mostly Disappointing in His New Netflix Specials
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