Dave Chappelle on Broadway: The joke is getting old
Post-show Q&A session stole the show.
On Tuesday, the NEW YORK — first night of a 10-show engagement at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, as most of the audience filed out after what was for him a subpar set, Chappelle returned to the stage for another hour, taking suggestions on what to talk about. What followed was looser, more surprising and funnier than what preceded it.
When someone shouted “Kanye West!” Chappelle embarked on one of his ornate historical digressions, comparing the rapper to boxer Jack Johnson, whom he described as a great pioneer for African Americans but one driven by self-interest. Asked about the recent news that a black actress, Halle Bailey, had been cast in the lead of “The Little Mermaid,” he quipped: “If they draw her as a catfish, I’m going to be furious.”
And when someone asked why he lived in Yellow Springs, Chappelle described a recent visit to Aziz Ansari’s house and marveling at how incredible it would be to live in a New York home like his. Chappelle’s extra note of seriousness seemed intended to set up a shift of gears: “Yeah, but he flies commercial.”
This joke, which he followed with effusive praise for private jets, is not exactly relatable. But it is, I believe, revealing, a reflection of the rarefied world Chappelle has existed in for the last 15 years of his fame, since the days of “Chappelle’s Show,” the sketch show that made him a superstar.
He has been a fixture of the culture for so long that it’s easy to miss how eccentric he is. What other comic would dress in a dark jumpsuit (with his name on it) that looks like something Michael Myers would wear in a “Halloween” reboot?
Chappelle’s peculiarity has long been an asset, giving him an outsider perspective. But he’s not an underdog anymore. In the past year, he has appeared in the bigscreen hit “A Star Is Born” and taken time to mentor Will Smith on stand-up. And now he’s making his Broadway debut, part of a theatrical lineage of stand-up explored on a recent episode of the illuminating podcast “The History of Stand-up.”
The theater might provide a rich target for Chappelle, but outside of his opening line (“Welcome to the most heterosexual show on Broadway”), it’s not one he trains his sights on. Chappelle doesn’t much adjust to the room. He does what he does, with supreme confidence. But his fiercely independent streak has led to a more indulgent performer constantly doubling down, returning to old obsessions, courting controversy and then exploiting it in his shows to play the beleaguered star.
After he was criticized for mocking transgender people in two 2017 specials, Chappelle seems to have become fixated on the subject, alternating between lukewarm jokes about this marginalized group and defensive justifications for them and even apolo
gies. “Got to stop with the trans jokes,” he tells himself at one point. But the time spent on this subject is overshadowed by his other favorite long-running pastime, expressing sympathy for rich and powerful men enmeshed in scandal. Chappelle has become the bizarro Joan Rivers, obsessed with celebrities, but not to skewer them so much as to play their defense attorney.
In his new show, he does Louis C.K. few favors by defending him limply. He also speaks up for Kevin Hart who, in his telling, lived a blameless life when his dream of hosting the Oscars was dashed because of a few tweets. And after litigating the case of Michael Jackson on specials in 2004 and 2017, he does so again here, telling his audience not to watch the recent HBO documentary, “Leaving Neverland,” in which two men who accused Jackson of sexual abuse speak out. Chappelle says he doesn’t believe them, and then adds that he has no evidence, before sputtering that even if the pop star was guilty, “he’s Michael Jackson.”
Of the dozen or so times I have seen Chappelle headline, this show was the first where I occasionally felt bored. Make no mistake, he remains such a naturally funny performer that he is always worth seeing. And where his greatest gift was once the conspiratorial way he would introduce an idea, teasing an audience by saying he probably shouldn’t say something, now his signature is to bring up something ridiculous and flash some side-eye.
He uses it to particularly sharp effect to mock Jussie Smollett, the rare disgraced celebrity he displays little sympathy for. Imagining the police hearing Smollett’s story that he was attacked by men wearing MAGA hats in Chicago, Chappelle flashed that side-eye before imitating an officer excusing himself and saying to a colleague: “Find out where Kanye West was last night.”