Purer, but better?

Paul BROWNFIELD quotes Dave Chappelle as saying, “Can you buy [women] and weed with Disney Dollars?” How curious that in an article that lauds Chappelle’s allegedly daring comedy and takes a swipe at networks for sanitizing television scripts (“Raunch, Rage, With a Smile,” April 18) The Times would choose to replace the expletive Chappelle used in order to make the article safe and inoffensive for its readers. More curious, though, is that The Times finds “women” to be an acceptable synonym for the derogatory term spoken by Chappelle. Unfortunately, we can only guess at what that term was.

Chappelle’s brand of humor, insofar as it regards women, is the very opposite of edgy. It’s conventional and easy. The Times endorses this kind of misogyny by cleaning up his profanity and replacing it with a word that may be purer but is not equivalent.

Jeff Weinstock

Sherman Oaks

*

I enjoyed your article on Dave Chappelle, long a favorite of mine, but it seems to me this article was written 40 years ago. Surely we are past having to qualify an individual’s achievements by referring to them as having “cemented [their] stature as the best black comic out there....” To presume that black comics can only be compared to each other and not to the Seinfelds, Millers and Chos of the world would be a throwback to a more narrow-minded era, not befitting the advancement of the media and the world’s view of race and racial comparisons.

Benson McGrath

Los Angeles