Amidst the smoke, some fire from Dave Chappelle, who’s not better than ever. But at least he’s back.
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By Robert Wilonsky
rwilonsky@dallasnews.com
9:15 am on June 19, 2012 | Permalink
It would be foolish to attempt to make sense of Dave Chappelle’s Monday-night set at the House of Blues, a hastily arranged affair that sold out in hours and occasionally felt as though it lasted a little longer than that. Buried somewhere at the bottom of his rapidly filling ashtray was a tight 23-minute set; the rest was all filler, little of it killer — the ramblings and mumblings of a “recluse” who one day disappeared and last night refused to go away. It was clear early on, somewhere around the sixth “They dumped Osama bin Laden’s body in the ocean” joke, it could be a long night.
Which isn’t to say it was unpleasant; far from. Chappelle’s an affable performer whose disappearing act has only rendered him more life-sized. His was less a performance than a late-night hangout with some paying friends; he even doled out cigarettes to audience members, whom he kept inviting to his after-hours pizza party at Sfuzzi on McKinney (the price tag of which kept growing through the night, from $300 to upwards of $2,800 — because, after all, he’s rich, bi … well, you know the rest of his famous tagline). And where most performers loathe their hecklers, Chappelle welcomes them — encourages them even, using their random shout-outs to get him back on track when the wheels go wobbly. By night’s end, though, even the audience had emptied its arsenal. The comedian didn’t know what to make of that blurted-out “Unicorn!”
Early on, the audience — most of which was seated, save for us unlucky standing-room-only souls jammed into the wings — remained respectful, letting the long silences linger like the performer’s chimney’s worth of cigarette smoke. It was as though they were frightened of scaring him off again, back to the Ohio ranch to which Chappelle retreated when he quit his show six years ago.
And he rewarded them, initially, with a fairly straight-forward set, opening with a few remarks about Dallas (“Who the [expletive] shot J.R.?”) before launching into what felt like a familiar bit about the three kind of guys from whom he used to buy weed — which sounded very much like a plot point from his 1998 film Half Baked. Still, the bit contained one of the night’s best lines: Chappelle spoke of a pot dealer from Brooklyn who filled his every waking moment with making beats, presumably because he fancied himself a one-day hip-hop producer. He would demand Chappelle listen to his work before doing business; said the comedian, it took 45 minutes before he’d even bring out the product.
“I didn’t hate him, I hated his dreams,” Chappelle said. “I didn’t want him to fail. I wanted him to give up.”
Moments like those, rare but still very much there on Monday, served as reminders of Chappelle’s brilliance: He’s not merely a gifted joke-teller, but a wonderful storyteller who can find intimacy in the cavernous confines of a concert hall. And he continued down that golden path for quite a while, actually, recounting an uncomfortable experience with an overly aggressive patron at the Dubliner two nights earlier (well …) that morphed into a story about what happened when he accidentally wore a tank-top to a gay-pride parade in New York City and bumped into a man who introduced himself as “a homosexual … from the future.”
At which point you could feel wheels go wobbly, as Chappelle began referring himself as a time traveler — only, “I’m not gonna go into the ins and outs of how I do it.” It was a bit to which he’d return often over his 110-minute set, eventually paying off toward the set’s end with a bit about 2012 Dave meeting 1996 Dave at a concert and their most intimate of “handshakes.”
But at that point the air seemed to go out of his set: “Dallas is really spaced out,” he said, one of those non sequiturs used to fill dead air till the thought he was chasing down in his brain stayed still long enough to seize. Someone yelled out “Brunch!,” Chappelle made a casual aside about the old days playing the Addison Improv and talked about how he stopped following the presidential campaign when Herman Cain dropped out. A bit about bin Laden segued into 2-year-old bit about a serial rapist in Houston attacking only men segued into a bit about how that’s all part of “Gay Bin Laden’s plan.”
Seldom did Chappelle talk about where he’s been or when he’ll return. He hinted that after he left the show in ’06 he was “depressed,” but insisted he decamped to China to recuperate, and that while there he pitched new shows to Chinese television. “I knew the idea was going to work too,” he said. “It was called The Cosby Show.” And while in China, he bought a home near Shanghai: “$450,000, 18 rooms — and it’s made entirely out of Legos.” Cute, but slight stuff from the man responsible for the “Reparations” sketch that spawned a catchphrase white people love to abuse.
The show — which eventually became a show all about the show, most meta — could have ended at any point last night; it never peaked (except, perhaps, with a bit about Lil Wayne’s detective agency, not a bit of which can be repeated here), it just petered out. But Chappelle, who at one point seemed determined to have a lengthy conversation with every member of the audience, couldn’t get off the stage. Imagine — the recluse who won’t leave.
“I really need some material,” he fessed up toward the night’s end. “I’m not doing enough with my life.”
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Yeah i had to read dat shyt over again to fully absorb how funny and diabolical dat shyt sounds.