The Study of Racialism

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The Devil and Dave Chappelle
By William Jelani Cobb--Special to SeeingBlack.com
Aug 9, 2006, 23:03

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The cheap wisdom holds that nothing succeeds like success, but the truth is that nothing fails like it either. That's the reason there are as many great epics about a hero falling from the pinnacle of glory as there are about one struggling to get there in the first place. It's the reason we say that someone is "a victim of his own success." And it's the reason a great many of us have lined up to view ”Chappelle's Show: The Lost Episodes.”

In Hollywood, where nervous breakdowns are considered a normal stage in career development, Dave Chappelle's flameout last year at least scored points for originality. Where the cliché ones involve overdoses, bad weekend grosses and cross-dressing hookers, Chappelle's crisis was more like a lost scene from Spike Lee's “Bamboozled.” Blackface, $50 million and a stint as a fugitive in South Africa are, at the least, a plot twist. Less benign observers are apt to say the man simply choked under pressure or got turned out by the cash that Comedy Central dropped on him. (The middle-tier talent Mike Epps weighed in, saying that Chappelle's stable suburban upbringing had been his undoing and a Black man like himself with a ghetto pedigree would have no problem handling that kind of situation.) That line of thought came off like a bad joke given that the tagline for Chappelle's show is "I'm rich, bitch."

At one point during his appearance on Oprah, Chappelle explained that it wasn't the money so much as it was everything that came with the money. He spoke of a White man laughing in a way that made him uncomfortable with the direction that his career had taken. That hazy explanation sounds like a lame evasion of his own fears until you reflect upon the events that prefaced his frantic flight to Cape Town.

In the first skit from the "Lost Episodes," -- the pieces that Chappelle completed before leaving the show in the third season -- a character confesses that no matter how funny the show is people will say that it wasn't as good as last year. Chappelle's character is silent for a moment and then says confessionally "Yeah, I already know that." And what the viewer already knows is that the brother ain't entirely acting when he makes that statement. But the irony – in a situation that is soaked with it – is that the material from the Lost Episodes is easily on par with the work he did in the show's first two seasons.

The problem was not so much the work as it was who was viewing it. It is clear at this point that Chappelle is the inheritor of the mantle held by the late Richard Pryor (and if ever there was occasion to lament his passing it is now when there is so much for him to say about this situation.) Chappelle mentioned later that he left because he felt that he'd been irresponsible with his art. But his work had not changed; the news of his massive contract and his status as the reigning it kid of American pop culture had vastly changed the audience he was performing it for. And that is what Chappelle meant by "everything that came with the money."

In his brilliant sketch "Bicentennial Nigger" Pryor starts out by informing his audience that Black humor started in slave ships. (In that same tradition, Chappelle's logo features the comic wearing a set of broken shackles and holding two fistfuls of cash.) If Pryor was exaggerating it wasn't by much. Black humor out of necessity began as a series of inside jokes. Early records of slavery in the United States are filled with accounts of paranoid slave masters who hear slaves laughing and believe that they must be the subject of the joke – a fear that works in the same way that a person in a room with two others who are speaking a foreign language becomes convinced that they must be talking about him. But as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're crazy. All the weapons, laws and shackles in the world couldn't save White people from playing the often unwitting straight man in a satire told just out of earshot of the big house. In the case of Chappelle, you confront the one question at the
heart of his dilemma: what happens to an inside joke once the whole world is in on it?

An inside joke is inside for a reason – usually because only a select few people share the references necessary to decipher it or the background to appreciate where the actual comedy is. In the wrong hands the joke will inevitably be misinterpreted. A profound sense of insider irony allowed Black folks to fling the word nigger around with no – or at least very few – explanations necessary. And nigger was the most inside, the most ironic and complexly encrypted element of both Pryor and Chappelle's humor. But it's virtually impossible for a White person in America to use the word nigger ironically. It would be the equivalent of having an interracial slave revolt – the point being that once White folk get an invitation, well, it ain't really a slave revolt no more. It's no coincidence that both Pryor and Chappelle met career crossroads that entailed traveling to Africa and refusing to use the word nigger in their routines when they returned.

Pryor told The New York Times Magazine in 1975 "I think there's a thin line between being a Tom and [depicting] human beings. When I do the people I have to do it true. If I can't do it, I'll stop right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. There's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at." That line was at the forefront of Pryor's mind when he returned from Africa in 1979. He renounced his use of the word nigger, later saying it was "a wretched
word. Its connotations weren't funny even when people laughed… It was misunderstood by people. They didn't get what I was talking about. Neither did I."

But for all this, race lines weren't even the primary breaking point in Chappelle's crisis. In an era defined by simpleton celebrity gloss, where the lowest denominator is also the primary target audience, Chappelle's real fault line was comedic IQ. His core audience, the people who were drawn to the first two seasons of Chappelle's Show, is multi-hued, geographically diverse and spread across a wide swath of Generations X and Y. They found a common ground in all being smart enough to catch the irony – even if only part of that audience could participate in it.

The work he created during those seasons is brilliant precisely because it is so unfiltered and true. His famous skit with Clayton Bigsby, the blind Black Klansman was a sublime dissection of the absurdity of racism. His "Race Draft" allowed ethnic groups to trade for people of other races that they'd always wanted to adopt (Black folks draft Eminem and trade Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; Asians walk off with the Wu-Tang Clan). Those eight minutes of comedy did more to explain the state of American culture than the last dozen academic conferences on "hybridity" and "cultural miscegenation." The
series "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" ridiculed the street ethics that have metastasized throughout Black culture. In other instances, he composed riffs like the insanely comical Rick James skit that proved that he could strip away politics and still leaving you on the floor gasping for air.

By season three, though, Chappelle's Show had officially crossed over, meaning that he was virtually assured of an audience too big to really dig what exactly he was laughing at. Jimi Hendrix encountered that same paradox when he became big enough to attract an audience that
couldn't grasp his guitar genius but did manage to get hung up on their image of him as a Black Dionysus who burned guitars on stage.

And this is where the demons come in.

Despite his later concerns, Pryor could get away with a skit like ”Bicentennial Nigger,” in which a slave laughs about two centuries of bondage, rape and lynching because his 1976 audience understood the bitter indictment he was actually articulating. It would've been disastrous for the crossover Pryor of the 1980s to undertake that kind
of sophisticated irony. The last skit Chappelle did before leaving the show (and which is featured as part of “The Lost Episodes”) features a mini-devil that perches on people's shoulders and encourages them to behave in stereotypical ways. In his case, the devil – who appears in
Blackface -- convinces Chappelle that he'll be fulfilling a stereotype by ordering chicken on a flight. He dodges that trap by ordering fish,but the minstrel rejoices when he learns it is catfish. The moral of the story is clear: he lives in a Catch-22 where anything he does fulfills some trait on an infinite checklist of stereotypes. It is a
riff on the racial gymnastics required to negotiate the most routine of daily scenarios. Or, it is a hilarious bit about a jigaboo dancing on an airplane. It depends on who you're talking to.

In retrospect, it made perfect sense that this sketch would strike too close to home for Chappelle. A case of art imitating life. Or vice versa. A man who has demons depicting a man who literally has demons. An effort to deflate a stereotype than instead affirms one. A comedian brought down by a single snicker from a single White man he realizes is laughing with the Blackface devil, and not at him.

There's a reason why people say context is everything.

There are dangers inherent to fighters who forget to duck and comics who become part of their own punchlines. Both Pryor and Chappelle were deeply concerned with humanizing Black folk even as they mined their foibles for material. That common concern may be the reason that Pryor
designated Chappelle his comedic successor. And that impulse to humanize is also what primarily separates Chappelle from the nearest in line to Pryor's legacy, Chris Rock and, to a lesser extent the cartoonist Aaron McGruder. But it's also the reason that one wrong
laugh could put Chappelle – at least in his own mind -- on the wrong side of that line between genius and Uncle Tom.

Rock and McGruder's humor is driven in large part by intra-racial anger. Rock's famous "Black People vs. Niggers" bit centers on an alleged civil war pitting the hard-working, respectable members of the race against the kinds of Black people that old folks refer to as "trifling." For Pryor and Chappelle, though, those kinds of divisions were not possible, or even desirable. McGruder's Boondocks cartoon –
which also airs on Comedy Central – both ridicules and reinforces stereotypes of Black folk but unlike Chappelle, McGruder doesn't seem the least bit conflicted about it. Case in point: the satirical "Survey of the State of The American Black Man" he published in the July 2006 Esquire. Loaded questions like "Whose fault is it you don't
have a job?" and "Which possession earns more interest: your watch or your house?" were great satirical material if you got past the reality that a sizable portion of Esquire's White, middle-aged, affluent male readership is wondering those same exact questions in earnest.

In that same vein, the young Eddie Murphy dismissed criticism of his Buckwheat character on “Saturday Night Live,” saying that anyone who thought the figure actually represented Black folks was ignorant. But if two centuries of American history establish anything it's that there has never been a deficit of racial ignorance in this country.
Damon Wayans had no ambivalence about suing to copyright the word nigger so it could be used on a clothing line he was backing. The Boondocks cartoon holds the dubious distinction of using nigger more times per minute than Ice Cube circa 1992. But neither Murphy nor Wayans, Rock or McGruder are at risk for a Chappelle-level crisis of
conscience because, to be real for a minute, in Black America the question of artistic responsibility went out with Africa medallions and Malcolm X caps. Epps was probably telling the truth when he said he would have had no problems had he been in Chappelle's shoes; then
again there's no guarantee he would've deciphered what was behind that single White man's laugh or even cared if he had. Seriously.

For all these reasons, it makes sense that Chappelle went back to doing stand-up in small venues, like the ones he started out in, after his departure from Comedy Central. Better to tell his inside jokes among the safety of a crowd that gets them. There's only so much irony that any of us can stand and all we really want is to be understood. The truth is that we get a little disappointed when our geniuses are fully in control of their gifts. We want them to be slightly conflicted and just far enough ahead of the curve that future generations get the option of lamenting how few contemporaries of the genius dug where they were really coming from. Chappelle's disappearing act has invested him with an aura of turmoil that all but assures he will be thought of as a genius. But whether or not he goes down as a tragically misunderstood one depends entirely upon your ability to decipher the meaning of a laughing slave or be left silently suspicious that the joke is on you.

Coming soon from NYU Press: To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, By William Jelani Cobb. www.nyupress.org/books/To_the_Break_of_Dawn-products_id-4863.html

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