8:46
YouTube, June 2020
Find on Amazon“They killed Malcolm X... and we let them get away with it.”
Named after the amount of time Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck, this surprise outdoor set was released on YouTube in June 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests.
It's not a typical comedy special. It's raw, angry, emotional, and only intermittently funny. Dave talks about Floyd, police brutality, Candace Owens, and his own experiences with racism. He chokes up at multiple points.
The audience is sparse and socially distanced. The setting is an open field. There are no real punchlines, just a man processing collective grief in real time through the only medium he knows.
Dave addresses his own silence in the weeks after Floyd's death: "I watched a man die on television. I'd seen that before, but I'd never seen a man die that way." He talks about his own encounters with police, about the expectations placed on Black public figures, about why he didn't speak sooner.
It's not his funniest work. It might be his most important.
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