The Elusive Dave Chappelle Re-Emerges, But For How Long?
Just before Dave Chappelle took the stage on Monday as part of a sold-out series of shows at Radio City Music Hall, a song featuring a loop of LL Cool J's famous opening line from "Mama Said Knock You Out" blasted over the sound system.
Don't call it a comeback!
You could take it as a suggestion that Chappelle had never really gone anywhere. Or you could read it as a coy reminder that none of us should get too comfortable, because Chappelle might bounce again at any moment.
He stepped onto the stage wearing a black suit, taking drags from a cigarette and looking much more muscular than the lanky dude that most of us remember from the days he walked away from his insanely popular show on Comedy Central and a reported $50 million TV deal. He said he hasn't been doing much during his time off, although some of his activities he's not permitted to discuss ("like the Illuminati Christmas Party").
Listening to his hour-long set, it was hard not to wonder about how Chappelle would have weighed in on the constellation of racial controversies and developments that have dotted our popular culture over the 8 years that he's been mostly off the radar. When he walked away from his show at the height of his fame, Chappelle had probably become America's most influential commentator on race — riffing on its absurdity and fluidity and consequence. His odd sensibility — thoughtful, irreverent and scatological all at once — is hard to replicate.
Not long into his set, he recaps a fictional phone conversation he had with Paula Deen, in the aftermath of her racial controversy last summer. He toggles between the two of them, imitating Deen's famous twang. She thinks he's calling to offer her support after he tells her he's also said lots of impolitic things that could get him in trouble. After she thanks him for his support, he tells her that's not why he's calling: he knows that she's unemployed and he's in search of a good cook. Then he quickly ratchets the absurdity up, adding a typically warped, Chappellian twist that I won't do justice. Suffice it to say, it involves a profane Deen dressed up like Aunt Jemima and kicking through a door, hurling racist invective at Chappelle's family as she serves them delicious Southern cuisine for dinner.
The guy who once imagined a black President Bush making the case for invading Iraq had been publicly quiet for almost the entire administration of the first black president, for most of peak Kanye. He went radio silent for his own, complicated reasons, but damn it if we didn't miss out on some transcendent comedy in the meantime.
During that self-imposed exile, a bunch of writers went searching the country for the elusive Chappelle like he was some sort of hilarious cryptid. Fans wanted to know how Chappelle — who many thought of as a personal friend — could have ultimately been so opaque to them. How did they not know him? What made him tick? And you know, how'd he walk away from all that damn loot?
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