Comedian Dave Chappelle has come under fire for a joke he made about world-conquering "Space Jews" in his Netflix show.
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In his latest Netflix special "The Closer", after detailing a COVID-19 induced quarantine he had to undergo, Chappelle says the constant UFO videos he would stumble upon had given him a new movie idea.
"In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from earth – that they're from an ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the earth thousands of years ago," he says. "Some other planet they go to, and things go terrible for them on the other planet, so they come back to earth, [and] decide that they want to claim the earth for their very own. It's a pretty good plotline, huh? I call it 'Space Jews.'"
The joke, apparently referring to the outlandish accusations against Jews during the COVID-19 pandemic and earlier, was immediately denounced on social media, whether it be from NPR critic Eric Deggans, who deemed it "antisemitic", or from a myriad of other concerned Twitter users. Jewish screenwriter Brian Koppelman, creator of the TV series "Billions", was one of few who made light of the remark, asking Dave Chappelle on Twitter if he had already sold the rights to "Space Jews" and offering to buy them.
Chappelle's controversy did not stop there, however. Further on in the special, the comedian expands on the "Space Jews" joke. Initially telling a story set in the United States' slavery era, he recounts how there was once a slave who had gained his freedom and proceeded to buy farmland and owned slaves himself. Chappelle then asks the audience how a former slave could possibly "perpetuate the same evil on a person that looks just like him. It's mind-blowing. And shockingly, they're making a movie about him. Ironically, it's called 'Space Jews.'"
While the second part of the joke did not garner quite as much online criticism, Jewish organization StandWithUs responded to it with an extensive thread explaining how it's a "dehumanizing and slanderous accusation", concluding it with the phrase: "Jokes tend to be funnier when they reflect reality on some level, rather than awkwardly distorting it."
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