What exactly don’t you get about Dave Chappelle?
Most would agree that he’s funny. So funny, in fact, that Comedy Central reportedly offered him $50 million to continue his name-brand show. His response was to tape a couple of installments, then drop mysteriously out of sight.
Chappelle told Oprah Winfrey that he walked off the show essentially because he was in danger of losing control over his own talent. “I was doing sketches that were funny, but socially irresponsible,” he said. “It was encouraged.” This is one of Chappelle’s most painfully revealing lines, both about himself and the entertainment industry.
Nothing about Dave Chappelle can be understood unless you discuss race. The black entertainer on TV performs for what James Weldon Johnson in the 1920s dubbed the dual audience of blacks and whites, with often-antagonistic points of view. If one fulfills the expectations of the white audience, Johnson argued, he outrages his black audience; if he satisfies the black audience, he bores his white audience.
Few black comedians taken up to this high mountain and promised the world have resisted the temptation to bow down. One thinks of Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx and, of course, Richard Pryor. Chappelle is the most recent to resist.
As for the black comedians who succumb to the temptation to demean and degrade their race, the list is endless. Just this week, there’s Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black Brit, sashaying “her” way to fortune and ignominy in Kinky Boots. Theaters recently featured Tyler Perry humiliating all 6-foot-6 inches of his “Mad Black Woman” in Madea’s Family Reunion. Earlier, the crowds lined up for creepy Martin Lawrence in the Big Momma’s House series and the goofy Wayans brothers in White Chicks.
Such comedic humiliation increasingly features a black man in a dress mocking elderly, overweight women in movies. (This motif in Hollywood films is ripe with overtones of emasculation.)
This aspect of Chappelle’s resistance to Hollywood’s casual attempts to get him into a dress was overlooked by the news media in reporting on the Oprah interview. “I see that they put every black man in the movies in a dress at some point in his career,” Chappelle said.
For a scene with Martin Lawrence in Blue Streak, the writers had Chappelle’s character getting disguised as a prostitute. “I’m not doing that,” he said. “I don’t feel comfortable with it.” The filmmaker persisted, “But all the great ones have done it.”
After digging in his heels, Chappelle was told about the production money his resistance was costing “every minute.” The comedian persisted.
“I don’t need a dress to be funny,” he said. “What am I, Milton Berle?”
The director and producer were brought in as negotiations escalated. “It really would be great if Dave wore a dress,” he recalled the director saying. The dress was non-negotiable until Chappelle made it clear that “I’m not wearing a dress.”
Just as suddenly, the script writers retreated to their computers and rewrote the scene for Chappelle. “You’ve gotta take a stance,” he said.
Stepping away from the $50 million offer for his Comedy Central show appears to have been such a stance. The funnyman found himself in the hands of young, white writers, producers and handlers with no clue about the essence of his comedy, to say nothing of his commitment:
“I don’t want black people to be disappointed in me.”