[AE.News. AE.Editorial] Netflix and the Malcontents of Laughter
So Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix, doubled down on the company's decision to stream a Dave Chappelle special that contained anti-trans hate speech that was at times only even thinly couched as jokes, as opposed to just being the comedian standing up on stage and telling the world what he thought about trans people.
Here's a primer on the subject, for anyone who has missed it or hasn't caught all the details.
Since the release of the special, trans employees of Netflix have been suspended and reinstated, and there's a walkout planned for October 20th.
What I'd like to focus on here today is the CEO's remarks, covered by Variety and summed up in these tweets:
Ted Sarandos Doubles Down on Dave Chappelle Defense: ‘Content Doesn’t Directly Translate to Real-World Harm’ (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/x8p97gNegv
— Variety (@Variety) October 14, 2021
“Last year, we heard similar concerns about ‘365 Days’ and violence against women,” said Sarandos. “While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.” https://t.co/o6jaeXv2Sm
— Variety (@Variety) October 14, 2021
Now, I'm not the type of person who objects to the use of the word "content" as a catch-all term for consumable media. I honestly think it's handy to have a word that means that, and while some creatives object to having their output "reduced to content", I am sometimes heartened to think that even if I can't always produce the kind of work I really want to, anything I can produce is content.
But the way that Sarandos uses this umbrella term is extremely misleading. 365 Days was a work of fiction. We could have endless and likely circular debates about whether or not fiction can be harmful, and when, and how, and why, but the idea that there's no correlation between real-world harm and an actual, real, 100% non-fictitious living person expressing his honest opinions scapegoating a group of people and inflaming hatred against them is beyond the realm of the merely disingenuous and out into the region of blatant dishonesty.
Or to put it less circuitously: the Sarandos defense of Netflix's content policies depends on there being a wall between the reality where Dave Chappelle is standing on a stage validating and encouraging his audience's violent anti-trans bigotry, and the reality in which trans people have to live our lives.
This is the part where, if I were tweeting this up, name-searching transphobes would chime in with "Lighten up, they're just jokes. They're not supposed to be serious. Nobody actually listens to them and thinks he means it."
And first of all, as I've noted, a number of his anti-trans "jokes" barely fit the bill. If people laugh, it's because he's saying things that, in the popular mythology of reactionary bigots, "you're not allowed to say". He is "just saying what we're all thinking", from their point of view, and the fact that he's willing to say it... okay, that's not actually remarkable.
As many have noted, there's nothing brave or shocking about transphobia. It's just the status quo, repeated loudly and often. That sometimes the people repeating it punctuate their remarks by claims that they've been silenced does not make it any less the status quo.
But unremarkable or not, it's emphatic. He's a prominent voice, saying it forcefully from an exclusive platform for which he was paid handsomely. That's not just repeating a message, it's amplifying and elevating it.
And second of all, to the extent that some of the jokes are jokes... that makes them more powerful, not less. It gives them power to fly under the radar socially because "they're just jokes" and to fly under the radar psychologically because people in the audience have an incentive to join in on the fun the people around them seem to be having.
Hateful humor gives an emotional alibi for people thinking hateful thoughts and thinking hateful things: they're not being hateful, they're enjoying something that's funny. This lets the deliberately hateful people give voice to their ideas in mixed company, and allows those same hateful ideas to take root in the minds of said company without anyone having to think of themselves as a hateful person. It can remain "just a joke" in their head... except when it isn't.
This is getting away from the topic of Dave Chappelle or transphobia in particular and talking more about the nature of comedy, but it absolutely kills me how often the people who are ostensibly defending comedy will do so by insisting that it doesn't matter.
Humor, the comedy-defenders insist with every ounce of breath in their lungs, doesn't matter. Jokes, the comedy-defenders will swear, have no power to affect how people feel. A comedian, the comedy-defenders will attest, have no influence over anybody or anything.
So I suppose that maybe it shouldn't surprise me that Ted Sarandos thinks he can defend the Chappelle special by insisting a real man using a paid Netflix platform to do harm to real people in the real world has nothing to do with real harm to real people in the real world.
That is exactly the understanding of how comedy relates to the world (or rather, how it doesn't) that the assorted Lenny Bruce Understanders and Jokerfaced Chuckleheads of Twitter have foisted upon all of us year in and year out, for as long as social media has been a thing (and in other venues for time immemorial before): a toothless, powerless thing that is incapable of accomplishing anything, yet paradoxically so sacred and important that it must be defended at all costs.
What a sick, sad joke that is.