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A video was going viral on Wednesday for showing grotesque injuries suffered by a man who ran up on stage and attacked Dave Chappelle during a performance in Southern California.

A reported beatdown from the comedian and his security team left Isaiah Lee — who was officially identified by local authorities and charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon — severely disfigured after he tackled Chappelle during a set at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles as part of the “Netflix Is A Joke Fest” on Tuesday night.

Here’s how things unfolded, according to ABC 7 Los Angeles:

Witnesses at the show took to social media, saying that the man rushed the stage and tackled Chappelle.

According to ABC News, Chappelle and the man tussled on the stage floor before the man ran away behind a screen on stage. Security staff surrounded and tackled the man in the rear corner of the stage.

Chappelle appeared to run toward the altercation, saying the man was being “stomped.” Chappelle asked repeatedly for security to remove the man from stage.

Los Angeles police confirmed to Eyewitness News that they responded to an incident at the Hollywood Bowl around 10:45 p.m. and a man who was reportedly armed with a gun and a knife was taken into custody. The man has not been identified.

OK, so now that we know what happened, we have got to talk about the Twitter aftermath, because it’s an even all by itself.

You see, every time anything major happens in the world of celebrities, Twitter splinters off into Twitter factions. Usually, it divides into Black Twitter, probably white Twitter and “I just really don’t f**k with *enter relevant celebrity here*” Twitter. And that’s pretty much what happened concerning Dave and his unfortunate attacker who, by all accounts, f**cked around and found out that tackling Chappelle wasn’t in his best interest.

A viral video clip showed Lee appearing to have sustained a major injury to one of his arms, which looked like it had been severely maneuvered out of place.

And boooooy, did Black Twitter have jokes for Lee and his failed attack.

So, yeah, Black Twitter kept it light and low-key hilarious—because sometimes you just gotta laugh at the craziness.

But then here comes wet blanket Twitter—a mixture of probably white Twitter, “free speech” Twitter and “this is all Will Smith‘s fault” Twitter—to rain on everyone’s parade and get all serious over the incident.

First of all, I’m not sure why all these people are jumping to the conclusion that this man ran up on Dave over a joke he didn’t like. We don’t know what his motive was. Maybe he just really wanted a legitimate Chappelle’s Show season three and was salty enough that he never got one that he tried to sack his favorite comedian over it. Remeber the white guy who managed to get himself punched by Mike Tyson because he just wouldn’t stop f**king with him? Remember the guy who drop-kicked Arnold Schwarzenegger? Do you think he was just offended y every Terminator sequel after T2? I’m just saying, sometimes crazy people just do crazy sh**.

But OK, maybe it was about Chappelle’s controversial jokes. But now we got people, mostly white people, trying to put this on Smith, and I just ain’t buying it.

Of course, white folks going there isn’t terribly surprising, because we all saw how alarmist and fire and brimstone-happy white comedians got after the infamous slap. They were erroneously comparing him to Donald Trump, claiming Will could’ve killed Cris Rock with a slap that didn’t even take him off his feet and, of course, they were whining about Will’s actions making it open-season on physically attacking comedians.

Speaking of Rock, he reportedly took to the stage after the incident and joked, “Was that Will Smith?”—so even he wasn’t above making light of either situation.

Chappelle also reportedly made a joke after it all went down, but his joke caused another Twitter subset to sound off. Apparently, Chappelle quipped that it was a “trans man” who tried to tackle him. Now, obviously, Dave was likely trying to ease the tension with an off the cuff remark, but given the fact that he’s been at odds with the LGBTQ community since the start of his Netflix standup series, he should have known he’d only be further antagonizing a marginalized demographic that just wishes he would STFU.

I wouldn’t include these people under “wet blanket Twitter” because they do have a legitimate gripe. Regardless of what you think about Chappelle’s right to tell anti-trans jokes, at this point, he seems to be going out of his way to be needlessly antagonistic. It’s getting weird and, honestly, the jokes are not funny—they’re well beneath his level of talent.

Anyway, we’ll likely be learning more about Chappelle’s attacker soon, so stay tuned.

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Dave Chappelle At The Hollywood Palladium
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