Something in the Way

Before the fall: Dave Chappelle in Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Courtesy Odeon Films.

When considering comedians, the similarities between Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle seem numberless. Both men — black and proud, masters of their craft — became famous for finding humour past the PC limits of racial discourse. Both signed jaw-dropping contracts (Pryor for $40 million US with Columbia Pictures in 1983; Chappelle for $50 million US with Viacom in 2004); both made soul-searching pilgrimages to Africa at the peak of their fame. Chappelle even holds his microphone like Pryor used to, hand loose on the stem, bulb bobbing the air like an ice cream cone that will never drip.

“You know those evolution charts of man? He was the dude walking upright. Richard was the highest evolution of comedy,” Chappelle has said of Pryor, who died of a heart attack last December. For his part, Dave achieved stardom at the helm of the sketch comedy Chappelle’s Show (2003-2004), a cable sensation that became television’s all-time best-selling TV-to-DVD set. In its debut episode, Chappelle played Clayton Bigsby, a blind white supremacist who doesn’t realize that he’s actually black; later, he was the unflappable host of “I Know Black People,” a game show that challenged its contestants to answer outrageous questions about black culture. Last Friday, the comic returned to the limelight with Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a rousing concert film that features many of the top names in contemporary hip hop and R&B.

Still with Chappelle, another celebrity comparison comes to mind: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. For starters, both experienced their parents’ divorce at a young age. Cobain’s mother and father split up when he was eight years old; Chappelle’s parents parted company when he was two. As teens, both men gravitated towards the arts. Cobain got his first guitar at 14; Chappelle began performing stand-up at 14. (He’s now 32.) But nevermind those surface parallels — their real connection is profound, immutable shyness, a personality trait at direct odds with the pressures of public attention.

Cobain and Chappelle both became more famous than they’d dreamed, at a pace too fast for either of them to maintain. In 1994, Cobain killed himself (or, some say, was murdered) when the burden of being the world’s biggest rock star became too much to bear. Last April, Chappelle was overwhelmed by the stress of becoming Pryor’s heir as America’s best, riskiest comic. Bothered by his inner circle’s lust for his fattened wallet, and being urged to push his show in directions that he disliked, Chappelle blew off his mega contract. He abandoned production of Chappelle’s Show’s third season and decamped to South Africa, not telling his wife where he was going until he was already there.

In Durban, Chappelle sought the counsel of a long-time spiritual advisor. (He converted to Islam in 1998, but almost never discusses his religion.) From the moment he left, wild rumours speculated about his whereabouts. He was said to be abusing crack cocaine, locked inside a mental institute, afflicted by pneumonia or writer’s block, or experiencing some combination of the four. All conjecture was false.

“If you don’t have the right people around you and you’re moving at a million miles an hour you can lose yourself. Everyone around me says, ‘You’re a genius!’; ‘You’re great!’; ‘That’s your voice!’ But I’m not sure that they’re right,” Chappelle told the Time magazine reporter who tracked him to Africa. “I want to be well rounded and the [entertainment] industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I’ve got to check my intentions, man.”

Chappelle denied being drugged or deranged, but gossip (and must-see spoofs) about his departure persisted. After two weeks in Durban, Dave rejoined his wife and two children at their family farm in rural Ohio. Comedy Central, the Viacom subsidiary that airs Chappelle’s Show, placed his series on indefinite hiatus. Chappelle laid low through the summer and fall, then eased back into stand-up — his first, fondest love — beginning at a club in Cincinnati. He has performed a smattering of sets since.

“[On Chappelle’s Show] I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible. I felt like I was deliberately being encouraged, and I was overwhelmed,” he declared on Oprah early this February, during his first public interview since coming back to America. (He is declining most media requests to promote Block Party.) Chappelle told host Oprah Winfrey about a disastrous taping for Chappelle’s still-unseen third season, of a sketch about “the visual personification of the n-word.” When the taping ended, a white staffer laughed in a way that unsettled his boss. “And not just uncomfortable, but, ‘Should I fire this person?’”

That was the beginning of Chappelle’s end. Next, he revealed to Winfrey that his handlers, obsessing over his mental condition, had tried convincing him to take “psychotic medication.” He seemed irritated when discussing Neal Brennan, his close friend and long-time writing partner. The two fell out before Chappelle’s trip to Africa — Brennan had been quoted in the news questioning Chappelle’s health — and had spoken just once in the nine months since his return. When Winfrey asked whether he might resume work on Chappelle’s Show, the comic named two conditions: “a proper work environment,” and that his half of the show’s DVD revenues be donated to charities of his choosing. “I don’t want the money, I don’t want the drama. I just want to do my show. I want to have fun again.”

Nine days later, Chappelle continued this odd, public conversation with himself on Inside the Actors Studio. “I don’t like to have to protect myself from people. I don’t want my life to become about enforcing boundaries,” he told host James Lipton. “But that’s what happens when you become successful. Your humanity diminishes, and you become something else to people. You ever see the cartoons, where they hungry, and [a character] looks over at his buddy, and buddy looks like a chicken dinner? It’s kinda like that.”

Dave Chappelle hosts a dream lineup of hip-hop stars in Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Courtesy Odeon Films.

It’s difficult to reconcile this psychic agony with the exuberance of Block Party. The film, shot in September 2004, catches the comic before things fell apart. Its premise is simple: Chappelle, having befriended a slew of musicians during his rise, invited a dream team of urban stars to perform a free, surprise concert on the streets outside Brooklyn’s Broken Angel house. Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) brought his cameras along for the ride, and creates an intimate, insider feel from the outset. Every frame seems lit by a smile.

Block Party’s once-in-a-lifetime lineup features Mos Def, Kanye West, the Roots, Talib Kweli, Common, Erykah Badu, John Legend, dead prez, Big Daddy Kane, Jill Scott… the Fugees. The last, reunited for their first performance in seven overlong years, are worth the cost of admission all by themselves. But make no mistake, the film is Chappelle’s show from beginning to end. Gondry finds some of its best footage as the action opens in Ohio, with Dave walking the small-town streets near his farm. He visits the general store where he buys cigarettes and stops random strangers on sidewalks, offering anyone who will listen a gold concert pass. (“Old people f---ing love me,” he professes at one point. A bemused senior supplies an explanation why: “I don’t hear well enough to catch the words.”) The passes provide transportation to and from New York, a hotel room in the city and a spot in the crowd. The idea, Chappelle says, is to expose his neighbours to another, different world: his.

There’s no footage of Chappelle’s family or home — or anything, really, that approaches his private world — but Block Party, more than Chappelle’s Show, reveals the man behind the persona. In Brooklyn, he is a gracious, hilarious narrator and host, summing the assembled masses as “5,000 black people chilling in the rain, [with] 19 white people peppered in the crowd.” (Everyone is welcome, he adds, while “trying hard to find a Mexican.”) Chappelle clearly performs for Gondry, but never seems to be acting. When the camera follows him backstage (“meet the people behind the gold, or whatever their image is”), he practises playing the dozens with Mos Def, and tinkles Thelonious Monk’s ’Round Midnight on a piano. Back out front, every act sizzles. Badu tears her wig off during a moment of rapture; Def and Kweli perform together as Black Star. “I will never forget this,” Chappelle says as he absorbs the proceedings. “This is the single best day of my career.”

Gondry’s film will keep Chappelle’s audience at bay for a while, but won’t sate them forever. Already, there’s hunger for more. Last week, at Block Party’s Ohio premiere, Dave derided a Comedy Central plan to air third-season episodes of Chappelle’s Show — cobbled from footage taped before his African departure — as “kind of a bully move” that would damage his relationship with the network and impede his return to the series.

Richard Pryor became a giant by overcoming his obstacles (freebasing cocaine, living with multiple sclerosis); Kurt Cobain slipped into tragedy by succumbing to his. Chappelle’s legacy remains a work in progress. Will he become a comic legend, or a legendary burnout? “I don’t know how this whole Dave Chappelle thing is going to end,” he told Lipton during their ITAS encounter. “But I feel like I’m going to be some kind of parable, about either what you’re supposed to do, or what you’re not supposed — I’m gonna be something, I’m either going to be a legend or just that tragic f---ing story. But I’m going full throttle. I’m going all the way. I’m eager to find out how this will resolve itself.”

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party opened on March 3.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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