The Believer has published another gorgeous long-form piece, this time by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, who goes on a search for Dave Chappelle—sort of.
It’s an odyssey that runs from the Congo to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Comedy Central. It has a surprise ending I will certainly not ruin here. (It also has observations you want to remind yourself to hold onto, like Ghansah’s description of Yellow Springs as “Not without its problems, but a place with a quiet understanding that conversation is the minimum for living in a better world.”)
I can say that without conventionally answering the question of where Dave Chappelle went—I mean, he’s right here; he had a stand just last week at the Paramount (Seattle Times review)—Ghansah answers questions both about where Dave Chappelle has always been from and where he’s always been going.
Here are a few good bits:
I ask an older friend who is black and a theorist of sorts what he thinks about Chappelle’s Show. I get an answer that surprises me with its vitriol: “Chappelle was at the end of the one-hundred-and-fifty-year minstrel cycle and fifty years after the height of the civil rights movement and ten years after the beginning of Southern hip-hop and in the midst of the most coonish aspects of dirty South hip-hop. He wrung the last bits of potential energy out of taboos that had been in guarded reserve that show niggas as violent, unintelligent, unlettered beasts. And he portrayed niggas that way (while maintaining an ironic distance from those caricatures). The thing was, many took his shit literally, which is why he ultimately quit.”
What separated Dave Chappelle not just from [white collaborator] Neal Brennan but also his fans is that he was suddenly vaulted into the awkward position of being the world’s most famous interlocutor in a conversation about race—the one conversation no one likes having. Yes, it is hard to look back. But it’s easy to understand why Chappelle was done with being misread, tired of explaining, finished talking. As Brennan, and then everyone else, told me: the man turned down fifty million dollars. You will never get him to speak with you.
