Raunch, rage, with a smile

New York —  When talking about his up-and-down career, Dave Chappelle is fond of quoting his relatives. When Chappelle decided to become a stand-up comedian in his native Washington, D.C., at age 14, it was his father, a music and voice teacher, who warned him of show business: “If you’re on your deathbed, and your best friend has an audition, he might not show up.” Chappelle remembers his grandmother saying that you should never be the first black person to do anything. And it was his grandfather, whom Chappelle describes as a “very proper dude,” light-skinned, blind from birth, who told him the story of being on a bus in his black D.C. neighborhood the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. On this of all days, a white person had decided to board the bus, and it was causing a ruckus. Chappelle’s grandfather thought the white fellow foolish, until he realized this “white fellow” in question was ... himself.

That particular anecdote became the basis for Clayton Bigsby, a blind, black white supremacist whom Chappelle played in a sketch on the first season of “Chappelle’s Show” on Comedy Central (Bigsby is seen joining a truckload of rednecks in harassing himself). The series just wrapped its second season amid growing ratings and increased media attention (a best-of from the second season airs Wednesday at 10:30 p.m., and then, beginning May 11, Comedy Central will begin rerunning season two Tuesday nights at 10).

“Chappelle’s Show,” taped in studios formerly used by Black Entertainment Television in Upper Manhattan, is often profane and racially incendiary, playing with subjects best not touched these days by the networks, who are busy sanitizing scripts in the face of congressional pressure, post-Janet Jackson, to make programming more “decent.” But on basic cable you can get away with more, and Chappelle, in a way that feels less revelatory than Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor but revelatory nonetheless, has taken advantage.

His show is kind of like a salon, a raunchy salon with Chappelle as host, usually dressed in floppy hats and baggy street clothes, introducing comedic ideas that are then illustrated by filmed sketches that star Chappelle. Chappelle’s host persona somehow channels both the emcee qualities of Bob Hope and the languid gait of Snoop Dogg. He has a way of diminishing his edge with a smile and a “Who me?” nonchalance. The angry comic, or at least the screaming one, is a cliche in stand-up; Chappelle goes the other way.

Almost everything on “Chappelle’s Show” is written by Chappelle and Neal Brennan, his writing partner going back to the 1998 pot-inspired feature “Half-Baked.” Sometimes too there are musical guests -- hip-hop artists unaccustomed to appearing on a network that has mostly gone after the young male comedy vote with signature fare such as “The Man Show.”

It is evident in the sketches that Chappelle can do a lot of characters and voices -- white, black and otherwise -- and that his comedy is all about inverting racial stereotypes to find the humor in still-uncomfortable issues. This season, viewers have seen his ebullient, high-voiced crackhead Tyrone Biggums ace any challenge on “Fear Factor.” They have seen Chappelle send up ‘70s disco king and former cocaine fiend Rick James. Last season, a mock news piece imagined what would happen if descendants of slavery were given reparations (“Eight thousand record labels have been formed in the last hour,” the newscaster intoned). And this season, there was the sitcom parody “The Niggars,” filmed in black and white, featuring a white “Leave It to Beaver”-like family whose last name happens to be that word. Chappelle played their milkman, greeting the family at the breakfast table by cheerfully shouting, “Good morning, ... “ well, you know.

The sketch is eyebrow-raising; even though common in black slang, that word is verboten on most of TV, to say nothing of polite society. Chappelle doesn’t think he’s doing anything that new. As he says: “If you put anyone’s private discussion on television, it might look edgy. If a politician slips and has a candid moment where he might say some real [expletive], it just looks like, ‘Oh my gosh, what are you saying?’ So here’s one show that actually acts like it happens on planet Earth.” In so doing, Chappelle is also filling a void unclaimed since “In Living Color,” which ran on Fox from 1990 to 1994, and “The Chris Rock Show,” which aired on HBO from 1997 to 2000.

Being on cable, “they can do racial stuff we can’t,” said Steve Higgins, producer of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” Though Higgins credits SNL creator Lorne Michaels with providing strong protection from censors, he noted that the network declared Puerto Rican humor off-limits on “SNL” after a “Seinfeld” episode used a Puerto Rican Day parade as the butt of a joke. Interest groups protested and NBC apologized, pulling the episode from its rerun schedule.

Higgins, discussing the general climate across the small screen, cites a joke from comedian Colin Quinn: “In this country, we want to celebrate diversity, as long as you don’t point out that people are different.”

For several weeks this season, original episodes of “Chappelle’s Show” drew a bigger audience than original episodes of “South Park,” Comedy Central’s tent-pole series; airings of “Chappelle’s Show” generally average around 3 million viewers. On the one hand, Comedy Central has long used the “second only to South Park” spin to promote its low-rated original programming, but in Chappelle’s case the ratings seem to correspond to the heat building around the show and the sense that his mix of raunch and risk connects with the network’s young male viewership.

However, Chappelle has yet to commit to more episodes. Having landed a show on television the way he always wanted it (few or no questions asked by the people upstairs), he is now weighing his options. He wouldn’t have to deliver a third season until January. There have been supporting roles in films including “Con Air,” “Undercover Brother” and “You’ve Got Mail,” but nothing that has given him the footing of “Chappelle’s Show.” He jokes about how little Comedy Central pays but also says money has never been the prime motivator in his career.

At Comedy Central, they’re not expecting Chappelle to make a decision about “Chappelle’s Show” until the summer. “We went through this last year too,” said President Larry Divney, who is retiring in May to be replaced by Doug Herzog. “The reality is he does have great opportunities to do movies, but his show is really hot.... I think it’s going to wind up being a very personal decision.”

Chappelle has walked away from a show before but under decidedly different circumstances. In 1996, after briefly costarring in an ABC sitcom called “Buddies,” he signed a series of million-dollar deals with Disney to develop sitcoms for the networks. The last one, in 1998, ended when Chappelle and his executive producer, Peter Tolan, quit a planned series on Fox. In the trades, executives claimed “creative differences” killed the show, infuriating Chappelle and Tolan, who charged that the network had insisted in a meeting that they add more white people to the cast to broaden its appeal.

“The network people were concerned about what they’re always concerned about: Do we like Dave?” Tolan said recently. “It’s the same problem that’s chronic in television. You see someone who is a unique talent, and you put them in the most unimaginative situation you can find.” Tolan, whose TV credits include “The Larry Sanders Show” and “The Job,” the ABC series he created for Denis Leary, isn’t surprised Chappelle has succeeded by going his own way on Comedy Central.

“What’s appealing about Dave is, he has that look in his eyes, [like] he knows what he’s doing, he knows he’s stirring [expletive] up, and he’s just sitting back there. I’ve only seen two people like that. The other person was Damon Wayans. His eyes looked out of that TV [on ‘In Living Color’] and I thought, ‘This guy is dangerous and funny.’ Look at Damon Wayans now,” Tolan added, referring to his family sitcom “My Wife and Kids.” “Look at what ABC has Damon Wayans doing. Maybe that’s him. Maybe that’s what he wants to do. I didn’t think so.”

After the Fox dust-up, Chappelle checked out somewhat. He bought a 65-acre farm in Ohio, not far from Dayton and his ailing father, a music professor at Antioch College. The farm remains Chappelle’s permanent residence, 30 acres leased out for agribusiness, he says, the rest for Chappelle. “Even Superman’s got a spot on the North Pole to chill out,” is how he puts it.

A penchant for stand-up

More than anything, Chappelle has the metabolism of a stand-up comic. When he’s onstage, casually holding the microphone, you feel he could be there for hours. A comedian is what he has been his whole adult life -- what he trusts, finally.

When he decided to be a comic, Chappelle said he told his dad he’d be content if he could make a teacher’s salary doing comedy. Even when he quit his sitcom and bought a farm in the middle of the country, Chappelle continued to play clubs and college dates.

He is 30 now, married and with two small children, but the night after wrapping the second season of “Chappelle’s Show,” Chappelle did three shows at the Laugh Factory, the L.A. club that has just opened a venue in Times Square. Bob Simon, correspondent for “60 Minutes II,” was in the audience ahead of a planned segment, and he heard Chappelle joke about taking his kids to Disney World and being prodded to buy Disney Dollars. Given Chappelle’s history with the studio, his punch line -- “Can you buy [women] and weed with Disney Dollars?” -- was double-edged.

Several nights later, at around 3 in the morning, Chappelle would board a bus for a three-month comedy tour, a show each night, ahead of taping a Showtime special in June.

Chappelle grew up in Washington, D.C., but he really cut his teeth in New York, where he says he had an hour of material by the time he was 17. His mentor back then, he said, was a comedian named Charlie Barnett, who taught him how to work a street audience in nearby Washington Square Park.

Chappelle met writing partner Brennan at the Boston Comedy Club in the Village, and it was at the Comedy Cellar, another Village club, where he met a beefy guy from Israel working the door named Mustafa Abuelhija.

Abuelhija had planned to become a physical therapist, but today he wears a cellphone earpiece that is always connected to Chappelle and the world of Chappelle. He describes himself as Chappelle’s “business associate,” a full-time job that seems to mostly involve being a devoted friend and the keeper of his schedule. He is Muslim, as is Chappelle.

Mustafa, as everyone refers to him, offers Chappelle the specialized attention that personal managers have not, in the comedian’s experience. Currently, Chappelle is with United Talent Agency for movie work but is operating without a manager, having quit his representation at 3Arts Entertainment, the powerful Hollywood firm that represents writers and directors as well as stars Chris Rock and Cuba Gooding Jr. After the Fox dust-up, Chappelle retreated into himself, his stand-up, his farm. He concedes he willingly made himself less accessible to the outside world. Plus, he said, his father was dying, and he didn’t want to be the guy who has the audition and doesn’t appear at the deathbed.

“The thing is all these people are trying to help you,” Chappelle said of his experiences in Hollywood. .

It was Monday, and Chappelle had returned to Metropolis Studios, this time to watch the taping of a Comedy Central pilot he’s producing with comedian Paul Mooney, a Pryor contemporary, in an angry-black-judge-show format.

“It’s in their interest for you to make money,” Chappelle continued. “And people do things in the only way they’ve seen them work. So they look at a guy like me, and the realm of possibility for me is below my aspirations. I’d like a chance to touch what I believe is my potential.”

He ticked off his artistic influences. Muhammad Ali, because “he had an authentic relationship with his audience.” Miles Davis, so individual “he turned his back on the audience.” Pryor, because “he brought such a human element to it.” Also Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, “because she owns her own show,” Chappelle said.

Chappelle is often compared to Rock, but the comparison is not always favorable, at least in terms of crossover acclaim. Asked what he’d meant, when in a recent interview he’d referred to Rock as “more conservative than me,” Chappelle said in part: “He’s a little older than me, and he wears suits.”

Maybe it’s also this. Rock has done four HBO specials now, including “Chris Rock: Bring the Pain” in 1996, “Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker” in 1999, and “Chris Rock: Never Scared,” which debuted on HBO this weekend. Rock, stalking the stage, shouted his routine like a preacher. He must have paced 20 miles.

The specials have cemented Rock’s stature as the best black comic out there and gotten him his own movies.

But unlike Rock, whose jokes are often polished declarations of rage, Chappelle is more idiosyncratic and anecdotal -- and thus harder to pinpoint. In his own HBO special, 2000’s “Killin’ Them Softly,” Chappelle discussed the unlikelihood that an international terrorist would ever blackmail the U.S. by taking a black person hostage (“Hello, yes, we have five black men -- hello?”). He also punctuated his run-ins with police this way: “Every black dude in this room is a qualified paralegal.”

It’s personal

He says these things as he casually stands there (he’s a bit like Cosby in that sense). Sometimes Chappelle will literally take several steps back, away from the microphone, smiling and laughing at what he just said. In the end, to enjoy him contextually you first have to meet him halfway as a human being. It explains why Fox got nervous about him, and why network executives, generally, Chappelle said, always wanted to know in meetings what his sitcom character’s job would be.

“And I would say, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe sometimes he’s working and sometimes he’s not working. A guy’s life isn’t necessarily his job as much as it is the people he knows.’ ... They couldn’t wrap their minds around it.” It explains why, in the end, “Chappelle’s Show” feels like the comedian has finally found a forum befitting his talents and his temperament.

And he’s drawing other entertainers into his tent. People like Wayne Brady, who most recently hosted a talk show aimed squarely at Middle America. After seeing himself become the butt of a “Chappelle’s Show” joke one week (“White people like Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X”), Brady came on the show to appear in a sketch in which he goes on a pimping and killing rampage, a startled Chappelle along for the ride. The bit, exaggerated as it was, didn’t completely work, but the point was made: Not knowing what to do about racial diversity, TV executives typically handle their ambivalence by neutering racial difference.

“Shows like this don’t get a chance to breathe, and that’s why it’s a hit,” Brady told the studio audience during a break in taping.

On this night, Michel Gondry, director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” was in the house. He and Chappelle, Gondry said, might get together on a concert movie, something that would be different visually.

Chappelle, for his part, presided over the evening wearing that look Tolan talked about -- the innocent eyes and sweet demeanor slightly betraying mischief. He was wearing baggy jeans and a loose-fitting Army fatigue jacket; often, he had an American Spirit cigarette going as he wandered backstage and came out again, lost in his own head space. He looked like a kid -- a kid with his own show and no one else telling him how to run it.

“Still dangerous,” the poster for his show says.

“I was born in Washington, D.C., I was raised in the brains of the country,” he said. “I’m a resident of Ohio, the heart of the country, and I make money in its pockets, in New York and L.A. I travel all over the country and tell jokes, and what I’m saying I don’t think is so crazy or so unusual, I just think because it’s in the context of television, with commercials, it seems startling. But really that’s just what comedians do.”

Paul Brownfield can be contacted at [email protected].