January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Interview
Dave Chappelle is back from that freaky flight
This is how — with stand-up comedy, the world in which he feels most comfortable, winding up a nine-city tour with a cadre of fellow artists who shelter him like a security blanket.
“This,” he says, standing backstage Monday night at the Tower Theatre, “is the perfect way to come back.”
Never mind the movie that opens Friday, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, the movie that takes the brilliance of Chappelle’s live act and mixes it up with some of his favourite musicians, the movie that was filmed before he said goodbye to $50 million.
He’s back live now, because the live stage is the safest place for Chappelle to deliver his provocative, often profane, sharply drawn takes on the complexities of race and culture that have made him the hottest comic working, his brilliance compared to Richard Pryor’s. Who else speaks about the twisted nature of racism through the character Clayton Bigsby, a blind white supremacist who doesn’t know he’s black? Who else has been able to insert an irreverent punchline — “I’m Rick James, beeyatch!” — into pop culture-speak?
It would make sense that Chappelle would re-establish himself back at his stand-up roots, especially after the year he’s had.
After spending two years producing, writing and starring in Chappelle’s Show, the wildly successful sketch series for Comedy Central, the 32-year-old comic up and bolted last year in the midst of a two-year, $50 million deal for reasons many of his fans still can’t fathom.
His tour is a live version of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a concert-documentary filmed by director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) that features the comedian’s favourite artists: Kweli, Mos Def, Badu, Big Daddy Kane, the Roots, Jill Scott, Common, Kanye West, John Legend, Dead Prez and, in their first reunion in seven years, the Fugees.
But it’s the nonconcert stuff that is the most engaging: Chappelle cracking jokes off-camera with a drums-playing Mos Def, picking out a surprisingly serviceable rendition of Round Midnight on the piano, trading comedic riffs with his set-up man, Ahmir “Guestlove” Thompson of the Roots.
Cameras follow Chappelle as he wanders around his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio (“It’s such a small community,” he says. “It’s where my father is buried. The people here watch my back ... . I’m like Krusty the Clown in my town”). He distributes “golden tickets” to random residents — the woman who works at the convenience store where he buys his cigarettes, a pair of teenage golfers, the entire Central State University marching band — for his concert, which takes place in a residential neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Chappelle used a nearby Brooklyn day-care centre as his headquarters, the same centre that slain rapper Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., attended.
Shot over five days in September 2004, Block Party is equal parts concert movie and social commentary as seen through Chappelle’s comic lens.
“We were hoping to define an era and a community without being too lecturing — to show people having a good time,” says director Gondry. The Academy Award winner is now part of Chappelle’s touring entourage. “On camera and off, Dave is charming. I thought it would be good to follow him around with a camera because he generates so much warmth.”
During filming, Gondry says, he noticed his star was under pressure. Seven months later, in April 2005, Chappelle went AWOL from his own television show with no explanation — not even to his closest handlers.
There were rumours that he was on drugs, in therapy or downright crazy. Turns out he spent two weeks in Durban, South Africa, on what he described to Time magazine as a “spiritual retreat.” He spent the rest of the year at the Yellow Springs farm where he lives with his wife and two children.
He later said creative differences caused him to flee, with the tipping point coming in November 2004. While taping a sketch in blackface, about racial stereotypes, Chappelle heard a white spectator laughing in a way that sounded as if it were at him, not with him. For the son of two academics, the youngest of three kids, a man who described himself as a “tension-breaker,” the tension had broken him.
He started to question his own happiness. As he told interviewer James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio” last month: “Is this what I want for myself? Did I get too big? I like people, and the higher up I go the less happy I get. I’m an artist, man. I don’t need a sneaker deal.”
Before he exited Chappelle’s Show, Chappelle taped enough sketches for roughly four episodes, which Comedy Central plans to air in July.
A spokesman said the network would be thrilled to have Chappelle back.
When told that, Chappelle, who had said previously that he was uncertain whether or not he would return, declared: “If they do air those shows, I will be so (ticked) off that it will be over. They have a contractual right, but they know those were not the shows I was happy with. I say, boycott!”[[In-content Ad]]
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