The Square and the Tower - What Dave Chappelle's Sticks and Stones revealed

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

-G. K. Chesterton

When you visit Florence, one place that is inevitably on everyone’s list is the Piazza della Signoria. The grand 13^th century central square is the focal point of the Florentine Republic.

It was where the public met and interacted. Rogues and scoundrels brush shoulders and exchanged opinions with the pious and the good. The likes of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Cellini and Vasari trod the same cobblestones at the same time.

It was where the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities occurred and where Savonarola, the instigator of the destruction of thousands of pieces of art and books, was executed in 1498.

Looming above the square, rising above the crenulations of the Palazzo Vecchio, is a piercing tower. The Palazzo Vecchio (‘Old Palace’) was named the Palazzo della Signoria, or Palace of the ‘Lordship’, the ruling body of the Republic of Florence. Inside the imposing gates and above the crowd, Cosimo de’ Medici had the famous architect Varsari build an above-ground walkway, what is known as the Vasari corridor, from the Palazzo Vecchio, through the Uffizi, over the Ponte Vecchio, to the Palazzo Pitti, so that he might travel between these buildings without mingling with the masses.

This segregation between the public in the square and the elite in the tower is often the initiation of a fall of a society. When the rulers and those they profess to rule cease to interact. Symptoms of this is occurring in the Western society now. This has culminated in responses such as Brexit and Trump, and many examples in Europe.

On the cultural level, the shift in the wind is becoming more palpable. One of the most illustrative examples of this is the reaction by the ‘elite’ vs the ‘public’ on the recent Dave Chappelle Netflix special ‘Sticks and Stones’.

I don’t have Netflix and have not seen the entire special, only clips. However, what I have seen was impressive. The humour has an edge, it provoked and mocked, ridiculed and derided. It revealed the internal inconsistencies of dogmatic positions championed and chaperoned by a progressive-minded media and a small but vocal mob on the internet.

This is what comedy is for. As Christopher Hitchens said of humour: “…one of the beginnings of the human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.” And Chappelle is doing what comics should be doing, being the gadfly, continuously disallowing those in power, or the minority who has been allowed to hold the whip hand, to be complacent; to prick bubble reputations and to point to the naked emperor.

In Niall Ferguson's book, from which I stole the title of this essay, The Square and the Tower, Furguson stated that 'In a time of chaos, the micro-managers who ascends.' The current ascendency of the moral micro-manager points to a loss of a central narrative, allowing more and more ridiculous and extreme new moral standards to be raised without being challenged. 

And too few professional comics has dared to do what they are meant to do in recent years, and unfortunately for good reasons. A few examples – in 2016 a German comedian, Jan Böhmermann, who recited a rude poem about the Turkish dictator Erdogan, was criminally investigated by the German government, at the behest of Erdogan.

Chancellor Merkel took Erdogan’s side. This is a man whose totalitarian government routinely shuts down publications and imprisons thousands of journalists, who built himself the world’s largest Palace for around $400 million, boasting 1,000 rooms, on protected land, and who is dragging Turkey backwards from a promising future. If a comic cannot mock Erdogan, from a supposedly democratic country with freedom of speech, without fear of the German police knocking on your door like the Gestapo, then who can you mock?

In the UK in 2018, Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula, a Scottish comic, was convicted by a Scottish court of ‘inciting racial hatred’ after a video of him training his girlfriend’s pug to do the Nazi salute went viral. This despite the context being that he wanted to annoy his girlfriend who over-pampers the dog and wanted to train it to be the “least cute thing in the world…a Nazi”.

You might find it adolescent and not very funny, but does it mean that you are willing to let bureaucrats and commissars decide what is humorous? To have a bad joke (which we’ve all made) potentially interpreted as a jail-able criminal offense? To have ‘thought-crime’?

This culture was already manifesting in 2010. A young man from Yorkshire, Paul Chambers, posted on Twitter after his flight was cancelled at Robin Hood Airport:

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

A week later, he was arrested by anti-terror police, had his house searched, charged with a crime, fined a total of almost £1,000 and lost his job as a consequence. Chambers lost his first appeal, but received much support on Twitter, with thousands reposting his ‘criminal’ Tweet. Comics and journalists also came to his defence including Nick Cohen, Stephen Fry and Al Murray. His conviction was finally quashed in 2012 on further appeal.

Even The Simpsons felt the need to apologise for Apu, after a ‘comic’ of Indian ancestry felt offended by the ‘caricature’ of Indians that Apu represents. Are you kidding? Who on the show isn’t a caricature? The fat, lazy American dad Homer, the Italian mobsters, the fighty Scot Willie, the ultra-Christian Flanders. Need I go on? Clearly a sense of humour is no longer a prerequisite to becoming a comic, who can only apparently be unintentionally funny. And importantly no one is forcing you to watch the Simpsons.

In this atmosphere, to hear Chappelle have a go at almost every so-called and segregated ‘minority groups’ made me feel as if I’ve exhaled fully for the first time in a long time. However, the reaction on Rotten Tomatoes says a lot about the level of disparity between the Tower and the Square. While his show garnered only 31% approval by the critics, the audience score was 99%.

This same phenomenon but in the other direction can be see with Australian comic Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, which garnered a stellar 100% critic review but only 23% from over 1,000 audiences. It is not surprising that an audience who paid to have a laugh is instead given a lecture on toxic masculinity, but the critics feel an obligation to like it, lest they are accused of misogyny. The documentary Knock Down the House, about the ultra-progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, received a unanimous 100% by critics, but a measly 17% by the audience. Given her utterly unrealistic proposals and self-important attitude, mixed with actions that in no way live up to her rhetoric, 17% is about right.

The same can be said of the new (one uses the word somewhat ironically) Rambo: Last Blood (28% vs 83%), being accused of anti-globalism and anti-immigration messages. This was the same with Liam Neeson's surprise hit Taken (58% vs 85%), with both movies dealing with the unlikely scenario of an aging protagonist single-handedly destroying sex trafficking rings.

The professional hacks and critics feel obliged (or eager) to tow the line demanded by an elite increasingly herded towards the extreme progressive position by a loud and emotional minority, therefore channeling politics into a Stallone movie. Whereas Stallone movies themselves have not really changed - mindless but often enjoyable escapism flicks. And the audience knows this and therefore are much more sensible in their reactions. It is the elites who are being literal and don't even know that they are.

Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel ‘The Joke’ was a satire on exactly the meeting point between the ironic mind and a literal, totalitarian and humourless state. The young protagonist, for making a joke, had his life ruined by the communist state in post-WWII Czechoslovakia. This is exactly what some in the Tower wishes to impose. A society where everyone is segregated by their shallowest identity and any transgression across these invisible boundaries, even in jest, or earnest enquiry are suspected with the lowest motives.

As anyone knows, humour is a great way to cut across differences. Mr Bean can make a Japanese man laugh as much as a Zimbabwean woman. It unites people and releases tension. Being made a joke of by those around you is often a sign that they have accepted you and look upon you as an equal.

Imagine if you, like me, are an immigrant. Imagine going to school and the teacher telling all the kids that they are not allowed to poke fun at you because you are a minority and will be punished if they dare be so transgressive as to make a joke that you might interpret as being offensive. Do you think this will help you make friends?

That those in the Tower has lost touch with those in the Square is concerning enough, the fact that they see fit to impose their ideology using the law where they can (such as the Canadian Bill C-16, which criminalizes the incorrect use of pronouns when addressing transgender people) and using shaming, doxing and other coercive tactics in the meantime is alarming. It's a modern Bonfire of the Vanities, where ideas deemed unfit by those in the Tower are burnt before more people can see them.

The social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are the new public squares. However, they are being policed by those in the Tower, who increasingly has no idea or curiosity about how those in the square thinks and who has seeded the square with stool-pigeons like East Germany or Maoist China. This makes candid exchange of ideas impossible and is an affront to democracy. Many of these issues were discussed on the Joe Rogan podcast with journalist Tim Pool and Twitter's exec Jack Dorsey and head of Twitter's Trust and Safety Legal and Public Policy Vijaya Gadde. 

It seems increasingly likely that if you dare express opinions or mere questions that are blasphemous, especially about a range of topics increasingly becoming religious to the radical leftists, you may well be banned from the squares. Like feminist journalist Meghan Murphy, for misgendering. Or Theryn Meyer, a transgender woman who is not a radical leftist ideologue, and who testified at the Canadian Senate in opposition to Bill C-16. Another prominent transgender woman commentator who is in favour of Bill C-16, but who is slightly smarter and more interesting than your average leftist, ContraPoint, has recently been goaded off of Twitter due to Twitter mobs after she expressed her discontent with the way she has been treated in trans-inclusive spaces.

I’m afraid she has contributed towards making the increasingly bizarre intersectional rod that now is being used to beat her own back. The funniest and perhaps the most pointed response about the needless maze of gender pronouns came from a young man called Grant Strobl, who, when the University of Michigan implemented a designated pronoun policy to let the students choose by which pronoun they wish their professors to address them with (yes, at a university), chose ‘His Majesty’. While supposedly serious academics and administrators were worrying about made up pronouns and imagined hurt feelings, with two words, Strobl revealed the absurdity of it all. Again, exactly what humour can and should do.

While for some the ideology might have sprung from a well-meant if naïve place, increasingly, the fact that the leftists are more than happy to eat their own who happen to stray from the official dogma, shows that many in that camp is mostly interested in power.

Compassion and forgiveness is distributed along ideological lines. Hence excuses are made for Jussie Smollett (hilariously parodied by Chappelle) but not Rosanne Barr, who is a conservative. Twitter will ban feminists who challenges certain aspects of transgenderism but not those who threatened deaths against the Covington kids and their families or someone on the left who has been posting gross racist slurs for years.

These and much more inconsistencies underpinning the radical left has done more to damage the culture and politics of the West than almost anything else since the end of the cold war. However, with people like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais willing to break rank with their supposed allies on the left, there is hope that the left can regain the noble aspects and principles it once had.

At any rate, the humourous and contrarian people are being forced from the left by its unbending and mirthless totalitarian tendencies. Generation Z is shifting right, no doubt rebelling as youths do against insistence on conformity. While this has its own dangers, it's a much needed re-balancing of culture. With vanguards like Chappelle, hopefully more gadflies dare to spread their wings. Because the only place worth living in is one where even your most cherished beliefs can be mocked. 

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.”

-          Voltaire

“The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.”

                                                                                                               - Christopher Hitchens