Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dave Chappelle: What’s In A Name?’ On Netflix, In Which The Comedian Makes An Acceptance Speech At His Alma Mater

Dave Chappelle went back to his alma mater to lecture the students about how his previous Netflix special, The Closer, is a masterpiece and how the kids these days have no idea what they’re complaining about, because his rights to tell whatever jokes he wants is more important than analyzing the content of the jokes. And no, this recording is not of his 2021 visit to his alma mater, but to his subsequent visit just last month! You may be able to keep beating a dead horse, but can you beat a bragging GOAT?!

DAVE CHAPPELLE: WHAT’S IN A NAME?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: On June 20, comedian Dave Chappelle attended and spoke at a dedication ceremony for the new student theater at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., where Chappelle graduated with the class of 1991. He had pledged at least $100,000 toward the upgrade at his alma mater, which planned to name the venue in his honor. But his 2021 Netflix special, The Closer, didn’t quite get the reception he might have liked from the school’s current students. They confronted him when he went back to the school last November, mostly over Chappelle’s antagonistic stance toward activists within the LGBTQ+ community, with a slew of barbs particularly aimed at the trans community. Chappelle had a camera crew with him to document that November encounter, but that’s not what they’re sharing now with Netflix. Instead, the streaming giant set aside 39 minutes for Chappelle to hold court at the school with an acceptance speech that recounts his time at the school and the major highlights of his career.
At the end, he announced he wouldn’t put his name on the school’s theater just yet, instead revealing a sign calling it “The Theater for Artistic Freedom & Expression.”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Today’s Chappelle is more lecturer than comedian.
Memorable Jokes: Most of the laugh-out-loud lines come from inside jokes, as Chappelle references specific teachers, departments, fellow alums and even rival schools.
This is, after all, an acceptance speech. Don’t get it confused for a proper stand-up comedy special, or any other kind of comedy special.

But it’s also unlike his 2020 YouTube special for the Netflix Is A Joke channel, Dave Chappelle: 8:46, because that performance was an impromptu impassioned plea for civil rights and the notion that Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murder two years ago of George Floyd. That Chappelle performance earned both Grammy and Emmy nominations.
This premeditated speech is something else entirely.
Our Take: Chappelle owes his career and his success to the Ellington school, and says as much in the first and last minutes of his speech to the students, teachers, staff and visitors. After spending his middle school years in Ohio with his father, a teen-aged Chappelle acknowledged he returned to a completely foreign D.C. in 1987, and who knows what would’ve become of him had he stayed enrolled in Eastern High School.
But witnessing the snaps at his local barbershop, and then seeing Bill Cosby on the cover of TIME magazine (“before all that disgrace”), inspired the young Chappelle to look up the nearest stand-up comedy open mic, where he mostly watched and absorbed the local scene, until an older comedian told Chappelle he’d need to learn how to act if he wanted to be good at it himself. That’s how his mom steered him to the Ellington school.
At 14, he had imposter syndrome walking into the school for the first time, and then flubbing his audition to get in. “I’m not good enough to be here. I’m sure.” And yet, the school took a chance on him, perhaps precisely because Chappelle knew what he wanted out of the experience. And when one of his teachers told him to stop preparing funny pieces for an improv acting class, he headed to the comedy club that night for his very first stand-up set instead.
Thirty-five years later…
If you want to hear Chappelle revel in reliving his career highlights and hurdles, from his Comedy Central deal to Africa and back into the clubs, to Lorne Michaels asking him to do Saturday Night Live and his allegedly signing that $60 million Netflix contract the night he hosted in 2016, then sure, this is for you.
But Chappelle spends the second half of his speech digging in his heels, and ditching any humility for braggadocio, and his ego is not his amigo.
Muhammad Ali loved to boast about his greatness, too, but he bolstered that by his great activism outside of the ring.
Chappelle gives back in money and time to his alma mater, but he cannot seem to do so without reminding everyone that’s he’s impervious to criticism because he’s a comedian. While he credited his high school for teaching him how to stay strong when dealing with Comedy Central executives or tabloid media, for example, he cannot comprehend that the younger generation might have valid progressive idealistic reasons for holding him to a higher standard today.
Instead, he claimed “these kids didn’t understand that they were instruments, instruments of oppression.” Forget OK Boomer, because this Gen-X comedian instead sounds like a relic of the 1920s accusing the Boomers of being out-to-lunch hippies, accusing them and any other critics of not being able to tell the difference between his jokes and a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
He demands we pay attention to the nuance within his comedy.
And then he says this:  “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it. And it has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right, my freedom of artistic expression. That is valuable to me. That is not severed from me. It’s worth protecting for me, and it’s worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions.”
Makes no difference to him if his speech is fueled by fear or hate, or bullying, or just plain wrong. And then he contends that the popularity of his speech is what really mattered.

“Listen, no matter what they said about The Closer, it was still the most-watched special in the world. And I am still of the mind, and I say this with all humility, it is a masterpiece. And I challenge all my peers. My peers. To make its equal. They cannot. I am sure. It will be decades before you ever see someone in my genre as proficient as me. I am maybe a once-in-a-lifetime talent. I am telling you the truth.”
I mean, Louis CK has been as proficient if not more so over the past decade, with more Grammys and Emmys to show for his comedy, but OK, Dave.
Chappelle then challenged anyone to top him. “If you have a better idea, then express it, and you can beat me. It’s that easy,” he said, adding: “If you have more talent than me, then display it and you can beat me with certainty. That’s what our genre is about.”
Over the closing credits, Chappelle introduced a musical performances from one of his teachers, Donal Leace (who died in 2020 from COVID at age 81). But it’s the lesson the late Leace taught young Dave that might prove instructive for this critic or any other. As Chappelle recalled, Leace taught them this about polarization: “If you can make everybody look at the same thing, at the same time, that their rational mind will decrease and the emotional response will increase. He said that’s how audiences work, that’s how mobs work. That’s how you make a person lose themselves in the crowd.”
Chappelle has certainly learned how to make us lose ourselves laughing, crying or yelling at him over the years. But what now?

Our Call: SKIP IT. Why is this even on Netflix? Does Chappelle’s hubris have any limits when it comes to the streaming platform? Apparently not.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Dave Chappelle: What's In A Name? on Netflix