Dave Chappelle Is in a Good Place as Netflix Special Arrives

Dave Chappelle has a new Netflix special that I can’t wait to watch in the coming days. He was recently on CBS This Morning talking about the special and a number of other things.

“But ‘Chappelle’s Show’s’ like breakin’ up with a girl and you still like her. But in your mind you’re like, ‘That b**** is crazy. I’m not goin’ back,’” Chappelle said, chuckling.

PLEASE COME BACK TO THAT CRAZY BITCH, DAVE!

“Well, I mean, if you look at me, right, physically – now, I’m, like, 40 pounds heavier than I was when I did ‘Chappelle’s Show.’ And people are like, ‘How did you gain all that weight?’ By resting and eatin’ and payin’ attention to myself. I have actual relationships with my kids,” Chappelle said. “I’ve been all over the country, touring all my life. But I never saw anything. Now I’ve seen everything. I could talk to people or I could – I had time to stop if someone said they liked me. It wasn’t like I brushed past ‘em like, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ I had time to stop like, ‘You do?’ You know what I mean? It’s like – it was just, like, the way that I engaged the world was different.”

“I have time to think about things. And I think for a comedian, if you don’t have time to think, you’re just not as effective. That if you– you know, it gets a little corporate.”

Good for the man. Life seems to move really fast when you’re a celebrity on the level that Dave was during Chappelle’s Show. Good for him to be able to slow down and start enjoying things. Could Dave Chappelle in 2005 have gone to a town hall meeting and to speak on local law enforcement? Doubtful.

“I think there was a speculation that Dave doesn’t like Key & Peele or Dave thinks, ‘Okay,’” King said.

“No. I’m a fan of this show,” Chappelle said.

But when he was doing “Chappelle’s Show,” he said there were “certain conventions of the show that the network resisted.”

“I fought the network very hard so that those conventions could come to fruition,” Chappelle said. “So, like the first episode I do, that black white supremacist sketch. And it’s like, ‘Well, that’s 10 minutes long. It should be five minutes long.’ Why should it be five minutes long? Like, these types of conventions. I fought very hard. … So when I watch ‘Key & Peele’ and I see they’re doing a format that I created, and at the end of the show, it says, ‘Created by Key & Peele,’ that hurts my feelings.”

Comedy Central tried for years to replicate Chappelle’s Show with comedians like Carlos Mencia, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Dunham, and a dozen others that I’m probably forgetting. They were all bad. Key & Peele was the first one that didn’t feel like it was trying to be Chappelle’s Show. It felt like an extension of the show. Some interesting insight from Dave.

“You tell jokes from everything, from race to politics … do you worry about crossing the line or is there a line that you won’t cross?” King asked.

“Comedy is weird. The line, the line moves. It changes,” Chappelle said, adding, “but I think a lot of, especially in comedy, a lot of it has to do with intent.”

“And your intent is?”

“To make people laugh, to reconcile paradox. I’m, like, just openly – sometimes openly venting. I think that when you get to a certain altitude, there’s more scrutiny over the things you say, ‘cause the platform is so powerful,” Chappelle said.

And then you become President.