Hello, Babar

Comic comes to Harlem: Dave Chappelle then & now

Posted 12/06/2007 at 10:02 AM  |  Comment?

I was telling a friend the other day how I didn't much care for Dave Chappelle until I went to a taping of the first season of Chappelle's Show. With the exception of his appearance in the Nutty Professor, Dave seemed to be a white boy's Black comic. He had a weird twang that didn't sound much DC (although his family's roots run relatively deep there) and he wasn't much of the mimic or the broad entertainer like his immediate predecessors (e.g., Eddie, Martin, Jamie, even Tommy and the other Eddie, who I have since renounced).

But it was the winter of 2002 and I was a new New York City transplant committed to soaking up the city. I heard about the taping from a NYU listserv and snagged 4 tickets but only used three for me, my cousin and my sister. The night of the taping it was brick and the production assistants kept the audience waiting for a couple hours on a windy southeast Harlem street. They had booked audiences to come in shifts--we were the last--and had fallen way behind schedule. After making it inside the foyer of the building that then housed BET's 106th and Park studios as well as a competitive public girls school, The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem (where I had once spoken on hip hop and gender relations), we waited some more and were finally ushered into the small studio where we were sat back and center. It's not a big studio but our placement didn't bode well for camera time and I wanted to be on TV, laughing hard and tossing my pressed hair. Then we quickly learned that we weren't going to be seeing any live performances of sketches or music. Everything had already been taped. We would watch the taped sketches in between brief intros from Dave who greeted us, looking skinnier and altogether much more low key than I had imagined. He cracked funnies for a good while before the cameras started to roll. Having noticed the frozen audience's perturbness, he thawed us with jokes and jokes and jokes and all of this with no concern for the time. Once we were all in good spirits, Dave plodded through the show, stopping to smoke, confer with his partner Neal Brennan and show director Rusty Fear of a Black Hat Cundieff at occasional intervals. For every sketch intro attempt, he offered a 5 or so minutes of stand up and he flubbed his lines quite a few times. We really got our hypothermia's worth and were ecstatic to have been the first to see a show that would stratospherically launch the young workhorse comic's star.