Dave Chappelle

[Shanmac]

Aw, Dave, get better.

Poor guy. I hope he gets the help he needs, and props to him for having the guts to do something about it.

[kate]

This link is probably time sensitive, but...

Time Magazine finds Dave


Hmmm. Says he's not in a thingy at all.

[gloworm]

PR spin?

[kate]

This may not work as it's subscribers only, but let me try.

Time Interview with Chappelle

In case it doesn't work, snippets:

TIME Are you on drugs?

CHAPPELLE I haven't smoked marijuana in months. My drugs these days are nicotine and coffee.

TIME Are you in a mental facility?

CHAPPELLE No, no, I'm not in a mental facility. I'm actually staying with some friends [at the home of a man named Salim], although I did consult a doctor when I was here.

TIME A psychiatrist?

CHAPPELLE It was a 40-minute session. I guess he was a psychiatrist.

We just chewed it up, and that was the extent of it.

TIME Why did you take a break?

CHAPPELLE My personal feeling is I didn't like the direction of the show. I was trying to explain it to people, and no one was feeling me. There's a lot of resistance to my opinions, so I decided, Let me remove myself from this situation. You hear so many voices jockeying for position in your mind that you want to make sure that you hear your own voice. So I figured, Let me just cut myself off from everybody, take a minute and pull a Flintstone—stop a speeding car by using my bare feet as the brakes.

Chappelle accepts some blame as well for the stalled third season.

"I'm admittedly a human being," he says. "I'm a difficult kind of dude." His first walkout during shooting "had a little psychological element to it. I have trust issues, things like that. I saw some stuff in myself that I just didn't dig. It's like when I brought a girl home to my mom, and it looked as if my mom really didn't like this girl. And she told me, 'I like her just fine. I just don't like you around her.' That's how I feel in this situation. There were some things about myself that I didn't like. People got to take inventory from time to time."

Brennan too feels Chappelle has lost none of his touch: "They're really, really funny. And I'd be confident showing them to anyone on Earth. Literally—Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence, Richard Pryor." He thinks the real problem was indecisiveness. "Dave would change his sketches so much, and it just got to the point that the show never would have aired if he had his way," says Brennan. "He would come with an idea, or I would come with an idea, pitch it to him, and he'd say that's funny. And from there we'd write it. He'd love it, say, 'I can't wait to do it.' We'd shoot it, and then at some point he'd start saying, 'This sketch is racist, and I don't want this on the air.' And I was like, 'You like this sketch. What do you mean?' There was this confusing contradictory thing: he was calling his own writing racist."

[monsterzero]

Well, I'm relieved to find that Chappelle isn't sitting naked in a concrete cell deep in South Africa screaming about Rick James and trying to slit his own wrists with Samuel Jackson beer bottle shards. It sounds like he's having one hell of a creative conflict in which he's being too hard on himself.

I doubt that thing about the marijuana, however. But still, it's better for a star to delay a season because he just can't get it right instead of going through with it anyway and destroying his show. It's noble in a way and explains why Comedy Central is being cool about it for now. Weird, just weird.

[rattlerbrat]

Not surprised at all to see all that racial humor is coming down on Dave. It was inevitable - it happened to Pryor, I believe it happened to Rock at one point, and it's happening to Chappelle.

[monsterzero]

I think he should go with it. Why not?

[rattlerbrat]

Because it's obviously wearing on his soul. As mentioned in that article:

The black pixie—played by Chappelle—wears blackface and tries to convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping, one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he wondered if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing them. "When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable," says Chappelle. "As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f______ time out after this. Because my head almost exploded."

Unfortunately, I think Dave has closed the barn horse after the horse escaped. I've heard/read so many people say that they love Chappelle's Show because "it makes it okay for white people to say n*gger". I think Dave is beginning to see that not everyone is laughing WITH him, but AT him, and that can't be easy. He's created a monster much bigger than the Rick James thing. I'm a black woman who has worked with plenty of whites (mainly male) since CS has started and I can't count the number of times I've had to leave a room in disgust because they're telling me to "lighten up" because they keep quoting CS, but it's the "n*gger" jokes they keep repeating over and over. It just gets annoying as hell. "Hey, Dave says n*gger so we can say n*gger! It's FUNNY!" As I mentioned upthread, shouldn't there be an equal amount of Jew jokes, as Brennan is Jewish? You would never, ever, EVER hear anyone on CS call someone a "k*ke" over and over and over. Never! But we get it in nearly every fucking episode of CS. I can't even think of a skit that just really reamed white people...that didn't ream black people, too. I'm not saying Dave shouldn't ream black people - I'm saying that 1) it's getting old and 2) it reeks of cooning.

I was watching something on Court TV last night, and a judge told these girls who were convicted of armed robbery: "You have sown the winds. Now you must reap the whirlwinds." And that's happening to Dave right now. I can't feel bad for the guy...I just can't.

[monsterzero]

Touche, rattlerbrat, I never thought about it that way. I'm a white male myself and I find it hard to watch such skits as 'The Ni**ar Family' but not in that particular way. When I laugh it's because it's so mean and cynical and awful and being the cynical bastard I am, I find it funny. I certainly don't take it to mean that I'm 'allowed' to go around screaming racial slurs because Dave Chappelle told me it was fine. I took it as probably Chappelle meant: as satire. Pity most of my peers are too fucking stupid to realize that. So, if it matters, I'm sorry for them. Please, don't feel bad if you have to kick their asses because they sure as hell deserve it.

Still, I think Chappelle sorts it out. I like him when he's being insightful, and I sure as hell hope he's able to conquer it.

I can't even think of a skit that just really reamed white people...that didn't ream black people, too. I'm not saying Dave shouldn't ream black people - I'm saying that 1) it's getting old and 2) it reeks of cooning.

You know, I'd dig him ripping white people a new one. Not that it hasn't been done before, but I think he could do it correctly and precisely to showcase the inherent racism.

[brinksteria]

CHAPPELLE [...] although I did consult a doctor when I was here.

TIME A psychiatrist?

CHAPPELLE It was a 40-minute session. I guess he was a psychiatrist.

Oh Dave, you guess he was a psychiatrist? Did he come disguised as a proctologist, probing your prostate? That would be confusing. And it was only one 40-minute session so it's not like you really sought help for a mental health issue. Got it.

You hear so many voices jockeying for position in your mind that you want to make sure that you hear your own voice.

All them voices in his head ... there's a touch o' crazy here. Not full-out batshit crazy maybe ... but maybe a persecution complex & crippling self-doubt brought on by extreme stress, pressure, & decades of weed. Hey, crisis happens to most folks at some point. Dave's human. Nice.

I love Dave Chappelle. Kudos to him for saying Fuck It! and just doing what he needed to do for himself. But while he's on retreat, he doesn't owe the world interviews. Wish he would just focus on feeling better situated in his skin. If he wants to come back to a showbiz career, I think the public will embrace him in a heartbeat.