HuffPost reports that Korean American comedian Joel Kim Booster has criticized Dave Chappelle for a racist Asian joke.
Chapelle made the joke on his Netflix special Sticks & Stones which was released recently.
In the show Chapelle made a joke about trans people being born in the wrong body. He applied the experience to himself, saying it would be funny if he was born as a Chinese person but with his current body.
“For the rest of my life I would have to around making that face,” Chapelle said before pulling a face with narrow eyes and exposed teeth. “Hello everybody I’m Chinese!” he said in an accent.
Speaking to WNYC, Booster addressed the joke saying it was “kind of sad.”
Chappelle is “someone who has been rich for a long time now and no longer has that many interesting things to say, because they’re not really living in the same world you or I are living in, at this point,” he said in the interview.
“It’s kind of sad; I think Chappelle used to have really interesting and prescient things to say about power structures and things like that, and I just don’t think he’s interested in dismantling that anymore,” Booster added.
“At least not from an interesting place, or at least not from beyond his own point of view — which is his right as a comic, I guess, but it felt a little bit, I don’t know, old, when I watched it.”
Chappelle’s Netflix show has been negatively rated by critics on the whole, receiving 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, audience ratings gave the show 99%.
