Dave Chappelle. Image: YouTube

CDMedia rarely comments on entertainment, but when the most popular comedian of his generation begins taking purely political pot shots in a weirdly scripted, quickly thrown-together hit piece sponsored by highly partisan technocrat overlord Netflix, an exception is in order.

Dave Chappelle has walked a twisting path during the first few years of the Trump administration. Immediately following the 2016 election, he hosted Saturday Night Live, where he delivered a monologue that was funny, reasonable, and even fair. Compared to what other shellshocked actors and media figures were saying at the time, Chappelle was positively magnanimous.

"I'm wishing Donald Trump luck, and I'm gonna give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too."

That was then. By 2019, in a new special, Chappelle claimed that he didn't remember exactly what he said about giving Trump a chance on SNL. Whatever it was, he assured the audience, "I really wish I didn't say that shit." Of Trump's administration, Chappelle jokes, "It's like seeing a crack pipe in your Uber driver's passenger seat." All of which is still relatively mild in the pantheon of Trump criticism.

In "8:46", a 27-minute mini-special released on Friday by Netflix, we see a different Chappelle. He is fidgety. He pulls his pant legs up to his knee and back down again. He takes out a cigarette and tries to light it several times over the course of five minutes. He stares at his notebook repeatedly. He struggles to find his groove.

This was thrown together at warp speed.

He weaves his own story into that of black victims of violence and oppression. Tenuously. He claims he can't forget the amount of time Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck--eight minutes and 46 seconds, hence the show's title--because that's the time of birth on Chappelle's own birth certificate: 8:46 am. Huh?

If that weren't irrelevant enough, Chappele makes the stunning claim that Kobe Bryant scoring 60 points in his final game in 2016 was what held the country together in the wake of the murder of several police officers who had just been shot in multiple US cities. Chappelle recalls flipping back and forth between the news and the basketball game.

The problem is that Kobe's final game was on April 13, 2016. No officers were killed that day. One officer was killed the day before, in Columbus, Ohio, about 50 miles from Chappelle's home, but that incident, sad as it was, was not tearing the country apart.

No one trusts notorious pothead Chappelle to be a great store of national memory, but this conflation is off by several months (the wave of deadly violence against police came months later, in July).

But the worst of it is when Chappelle tries to tear down two conservative women. First, Candace Owens, whose recent video about the media and Black Lives Matter attempt to beatify drug addict and counterfeiter George Floyd. Owens' video got millions of hits. Netflix sent Chappelle after her. "I don't care what this nigger did. I don't care if he personally kicked Candace Owens in her stinky pussy," he says.

Chappelle goes on to claim that people want to hear from him on matters of race...because he's real.

"...you trust me. You don't expect me to be perfect. But I don't lie to you. I'm just a guy. And I don't lie to you. And every institution--every institution we trust--lies to us.

Randomly, Chappelle tells white women they better "shut the fuck up," and that serial cop killer Michael Dorner called him a genius...in his pre-crime-spree manifesto. This is part of the lead-up to skewering Fox news host Laura Ingraham.

"LeBron James once said something about racism, and Laura Ingraham, which, I will say publicly anywhere, anytime, is a cunt. Tell 'em I said it. Told one of Ohio's greatest residents ever, 'Shut up and dribble.'"

Chappelle then explains his absence at this year's Grammy Awards by way of Kobe Bryant's death in a helicopter crash. To underscore how devastated he was, Chappelle notes that Kobe's two jersey numbers, 8 and 24, are the same as his birthday, August 24. Will the coincidences never cease?

Finally, we learn that Chappelle is to be the MC of media race issues going forward due to his slave lineage. He got it wrong when he said in his 2016 SNL monologue that black people had only been invited to the White House twice in the early days of American history. In fact, Chappelle says, Woodrow Wilson received a delegation from South Carolina led by AME Bishop William David Chappelle, Dave's great-grandfather, who was born a slave.

Odd that Chappelle would have forgotten this compelling bit of history until just now.

"Why isn't David Chappelle saying anything? Because David Chappelle understands what the fuck he's seeing, and these streets will speak for themselves whether I am alive or dead...after this shit, it's just [imitating gunfire] rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tattity-TAT!"

An ominous call to arms, quickly produced and distributed at this red-hot moment in American history. It's official: Netflix has Chappelle. Who knows what they have on him, but he's their new mouthpiece.