Staging standpoints: truth-telling and situated knowledges in Theo Maassen’s Vankwaadtoterger and Dave Chappelle’s The Closer

Stand-up comedians are often described as truth-tellers, yet the relationship between comedy and truth is typically taken for granted. In this article, I interrogate the politics of truth-telling in stand-up comedy. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s genealogy of critique, feminist standpoint theory, and recent scholarship in comedy studies, I argue that stand-up is best conceptualized as a historically variable, critical regime of truth. I depart from the optimistic, liberal account of parrhesiastic free speech that has dominated comedy and satire scholarship over the past decades in favour of an account that attends to the sociocultural standpoint of the comedian. Analysing the work of two differently situated male comedians, Theo Maassen (Dutch, white) and Dave Chappelle (American, Black), I show that their work exemplifies a broader tension in contemporary comedy between two opposing truth regimes: a liberal-universalist humour regime advocating a weak notion of empathy and an ideal of equal-opportunity offence, and the idea that stand-up is grounded in the experiential truth of comedians speaking from socially marginalized positions. Teasing out this contradiction helps make sense of recent debates about the public roles and responsibilities of stand-up comedians, and the broader identity-political struggles in which their work has become enmeshed.