BUCK: You have Dave Chappelle with his Netflix special. I think Killin’ Them Softly is the one I think is the best Dave Chappelle special ever and that’s from way back maybe, oh, I think 2000 or something, the early 2000s.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Killin’ Them Softly turned him into kind of a superstar before Chappelle’s Show propelled him even beyond that. Netflix is defending him. The CEO, Ted Sarandos, is doubling down the Chappelle defense here. They’re not going to pull the special. But here’s the thing. Now, I like the outcome, but I think that we need to discuss a little bit of how they’re getting here. You know in math class you had to show your work?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I want us to look close. You’re getting the right answer, which you can defend Chappelle on this one. But while you are, Clay, they’ve got so much money invested into this guy and this special and it’s causing so many people to watch Netflix, sign up for Netflix, that as much as I wish I could say, “It is a proper First Amendment position in principle,” right?

It’s not really a First Amendment issue ’cause it’s not the government but it’s a free speech issue. I think that they’re realizing, one, there’s a lot of money on the line here and, two, we’ve always gotta point out this notion that mockery is the same as real-world violence. “Speech = violence.” We have to fight this and shut it down for absurdity because it is the gateway to totalitarianism for the left.

CLAY: Here’s what I’ll say. I think that comedians — and some people think I’m crazy for saying this. But I think comedians are one of the most important allies that those of us out there who despise woke culture have. You and I are certainly in that camp. Comedians are the antithesis of woke culture because anyone who has ever been in a comedy club understands that the way you ridicule absurdity…

Oftentimes very wittily and also in ways that you could not directly is through the use of satire and through the use of comedy and satirical ridicule. And the idea that comedians are being told, “Hey, you can’t make fun of X” or “you can’t make fun of Y” represents the death of comedy because comedy, like creativity itself, is about exploring boundaries.

Great art, Buck — and it’s like people on the left have forgotten this — doesn’t come from dogma. It comes from nuance, and when you eliminate the edges of comedy, you are eliminating nuance. You are eliminating risk. You are limiting the outgrowth of creativity. So to me… I had this conversation ’cause I’m in L.A. right now.

I was out the other night with somebody who’s high up in production in L.A., and he was saying, “You know what? L.A. used to be where eccentrics would go, where people on the edges of society would go to create dynamic, new content. Now L.A.’s about mind control. If you don’t have the right opinion, you get canceled.” It’s the opposite of everything that used to be in our culture when it came to creativity.

BUCK: I still think that if Netflix felt like they had more to gain from pulling it than from leaving it, they probably would pull it. I don’t think that they’re big believers in free speech. So in this case with Chappelle, I think they’re just going with the bottom line. But also, you have to remember this is the trans activist that was suspended from Netflix because the trans activist… I’m not sure what the preferred pronouns are.

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: The trans activist. It’s a he — I mean, a male — ran in and got all upset about it and then they suspended him and now he’s been reinstated. But, anyway, the whole situation is that they’re claiming that by Chappelle making jokes, it translates to violence against transgender people.

And that is a completely disingenuous argument that must be fought at every turn because that then becomes the excuse for absolutist censorship, especially around issues of satire and comedic criticism which the left cannot abide because the left is largely absurd.

CLAY: Not only that, the left is afraid ’cause the right’s getting a lot funnier. It used to be that conservatives were not anywhere near as funny. I think there’s more freedom in conservative thought now such that some of the most interesting and engaging and intelligent and thought-provoking commentary is not coming from the left wing anymore, and I think they’re threatened, and I think there are a lot of people like Dave Chappelle that haven’t realized it yet, but they’ve got a lot more in common with you and me than they do with their left-wing brethren. I think so. I think so.

BUCK: Dave Chappelle is a socialist my friend. He agrees with us on wokeness a little bit sometimes for five minutes.

CLAY: He ain’t a socialist if he’s selling his program to Netflix for $50 million.

BUCK: Oh, the richest people in America are socialists by their own admission, my friend.

CLAY: They pretend to be, but they got production companies, and they’re hardly paying any taxes at all.