For black America, the introduction of Chappelle's Show in 2003 was groundbreaking. It was like Dave Chappelle was taking many things we'd said in our own homes and put them on-screen, but as Morehouse professor David Wall Rice breaks down in Ebony, the show was a journey rather than a destination.
Still, there was an "afflict the comfortable" mentality built into Chappelle's Show. Dave and Neal's Frankenstein was raw in a way that could grate certain people. It didn't have the cartoon filter of their contemporary, comic-strip cousin, The Boondocks. Volatile truths were told that had no deference to social niceties; though there was a healthy respect for their presence, it was their fourth wall. The show was subversive like the best hip-hop artists—Chappelle's peers—were at the time.
The sketches, intro music by the militant hip-hop duo dead prez, cameos by Wayne Brady and John Mayer, and the integration of Chappelle's parents' professorial sensibilities reflected his developing identity. The best of Chappelle's Show placed his narratives as devices for insight into modern tropes of culture and context that were far much more accessible and impactful in the everyday than academic journal articles and lectures.
Chappelle's scathing critiques were tempered with a juvenile silliness, a slippery slope. Silliness was privileged over incisive commentary. Sometimes it threatened to compromise the more sophisticated turns, making them little more than shuffles, i.e., that dude who'd randomly pop up doing the robot in otherwise unrelated skits. Base humor came to define the very popular show, and many saw it as a sell-out move because of an imbalance that stressed puerile sensibilities over revolutionary insights. His Rick James "I'm rich, b*tch" catchphrase trumped skits like the "Racial Draft," "President Black Bush" and so on.
Read David Wall Rice's entire piece at Ebony.
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