In Lauryn Hill’s song, You Just Lost One, the opening lyric is, “It’s funny how money changes situations…miscommunication leads to complications.” Dave Chappelle was so funny in his first season that a national audience found him…on cable, and his first season ad sales went through the roof. The second season was edgier and while we found ourselves still laughing, we also found ourselves saying to ourselves, “That’s wasn’t funny.” There were those moments in the first season too, like blind black klansman or how black people would act if they got reparations. Race crimes are still too prevalent to make fun of, and reparations is too serious a subject to make light of. Both subjects, though highly sensitive, got lost in host of outrageously funny skits like the Rick James and Oprah’s Baby Daddy skits (that even Oprah had to laugh at). The second season saw more of these “socially irresponsible” skits and soon thereafter, Dave Chappelle miscommunications were leading to complications. More and more people were becoming offended by his comedy, and he had begun his transition from comedian to buffoon. By the third season, Dave revealed on Oprah that he noticed that people, particularly one of his producer/writers (the people that were feeding him this mess), were no longer laughing with him, but laughing at him. People got upset when Spike Lee, a few years back, implied such situations existed in his movie, Bamboozled, Only Dave Chappelle wasn’t playing a part—he was living the part. Dave realized that he went from playing the fool to being the fool, then realized that he was a “double fool” when he realized how much money others were making off his foolishness that denigrated his race in the process. The Dave Chappelle Show was the number one cable show for two years running, and his DVD sales were the top-selling DVDs for two years running. As dumb as he acted, it didn’t take Dave long to figure out that while they gladly paid him $50 million for four years, that his backers were projected to make over a half billion dollars, mostly off DVD revenues that they barely cut him in on. On top of that, they had a whole slew of new skits for Dave play off black people in the most asinine and degenerate images (including putting him in a dress—emasculation always being an issue for independent-minded black men controlled by white men) that even he, himself, couldn’t see playing. Dave Chappelle’s comedy had become the classic tragedy that the entertainment masks of comedy and tragedy often portray. He simply couldn’t live with himself, what he had come to represent, and he saw no end to what he called “the manipulation,” so he left the show. And went, of all places, to South Africa for deep reflection. Of course, the spin was that it was a nervous breakdown, a drug relapse and any other debilitating explanation that would discredit Chappelle and disarm the monster they had created. But the truth set Dave Chappelle free. Not a lot of people would have had the courage (or the conscience) to walk away from $50 Million dollars. But Dave’s epiphany, like Richard Pryor’s before it, helped bring Chappelle back from over the edge. There’s a thin line, Dave found, between funny and disgrace. And there’s a limit to buffoonery that takes away a people’s dignity.
Dave Chappelle is not the first (nor will he be the last) to lose sight of what’s funny, and what’s disgraceful. Popular (mainstream) fame has a way of stripping black comedians of their dignity and the race suffers in the process. Everybody thought Stepin’ Fetchin’ was funny—except black people. Everybody thought Amos n’ Andy was funny—except black people. And everybody thinks Dave Chappelle is a pretty funny fellow, including black people—as long as Dave now knows where the edge of the cliff is, that fine line between funny and disgraceful. What became painfully obvious in the Oprah interview? Dave had learned, the hard way, the difference between playing the fool and being the fool. He said he’d come back if the DVD split was re-negotiated, and can do comedy—his way. Thus, is the tragedy of comedy—never knowing when the laugh is with you or about you. Dave realized he’d become his own joke One not even he could laugh at.
Dave Chappelle is still a funny man, but he now recognizes that he has to live with himself in the process of making people laugh. He wants people to laugh with him again—not at him.
- Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of 50 Years After Brown: The State of Black Equality In America (Kabili Press, 2005). He can be reached at www.AnthonySamad.com
BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS
