Dave Chappelle’s Latest Stand-up Special Hits Netflix Next Week, and Here’s a Teaser

Surprise: Dave Chappelle’s next stand-up special, The Closer, comes out on Netflix next week, on Tuesday, Oct. 5. It’s his sixth special for the streamer, and potentially his last: the press release notes that it “completes a body of work which includes” his five previous Netflix specials. Like those those five, The Closer was directed by Stan Lathan.

There’s not much to the teaser, which makes sense, since, y’know, it’s a teaser. Just a bunch of clips of Chappelle on stage, an audience laughing, and then a few soundbites of Chappelle talking. It’s not even jokes, really, more him seemingly responding, once again, to those who have criticized him for victim-blaming and for his material about trans people. “Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean,” Chappelle says in the teaser. “Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean; I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

Humor, of course, is subjective. Chappelle gave us the best stand-up special of 2020 with the YouTube short “8:46,” so he’s clearly still a master of the form. But it’s rarely funny to see a comedian complain about criticism, or people who don’t find them funny, or make lazy “triggered” comments, and that’s something Chappelle has done a little too much of lately. Hopefully he can move past that on The Closer, and that bit about being mean vs. being funny is just a quick aside that Netflix decided to highlight for the teaser.

Anyway: here’s that teaser, all 30 seconds of it. The Closer drops on Netflix in six days.