Chappelle: Accidental comedian
“Occasionally, we are privileged to examine the craft of one of the acknowledged leaders of a generation. Tonight, as we begin the midway point of our 12th year, is such a night.”
So begins the brilliantly fawning James Lipton, host of Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio.” His guest Sunday night, the guy he’s referring to, is comedian Dave Chappelle, who became infamous last spring, walking out on Season 3 of his popular Comedy Central series, “Chappelle’s Show,” in the midst of production, telling practically no one where he was going (Africa) and leaving a $50-million deal in the lurch.
How this qualifies the comedian for entry into the Actors Studio is unclear. Chappelle, with a concert movie due out next month, “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” also was on “Oprah” last week and the Grammys on Wednesday night (introducing Sly Stone, another performer who disappeared for a while).
After becoming a tabloid curiosity for fleeing his flourishing career last year, Chappelle has re-emerged as touring comedian and self-made Hollywood dissident, someone who took other people’s money and then didn’t show up to work because he was “stressed out,” because he saw the fame and the power structure in Hollywood stealing his soul and eating at his art.
Underneath the rumors of a drug problem or a mental illness (both of which Chappelle has denied) was the story of a raw, smart and vulnerable artist in the Richard Pryor mold who was either boldly taking back control of an exploding career being shaped by the wrong people or a paranoid entertainer skipping out on his responsibilities.
Either way, what is pure, and interesting, about Chappelle is the way he’s long seemed to stay one step ahead of big-time success, flirting with TV and movie deals and then retreating into self-imposed exile (he maintains a farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where his late father taught at Antioch College).
If Pryor ultimately disappeared into big-budget movies, Chappelle, at 32, has long stuck his nose over this same precipice and decided not to jump, driving his handlers crazy for seeing in superstar success a paradox, something he wanted and hated.
“My father said, ‘Name your price at the beginning. If it ever gets more expensive than the price you named, get out of there.’ Thus
The collision of two worlds -- Lipton’s sponge bath of a talk show juxtaposed against Chappelle’s miscreant loose cannon -- makes for some “Saturday Night Live” moments.
“Tell us about that writing process,” Lipton asks at one point about Chappelle’s pot spoof “Half-Baked.” “How did you guys work?”
“I can’t remember. I was high, man,” Chappelle tells him.
Lipton’s severe poker face is still a kick, as is the way he frames questions. The other week, interviewing Martin Lawrence, he said, “We come now to an important period in this narrative. Who is Froggy?”
It’s a performance, kind of. Chappelle, for his part, laughs at the idea of himself on this show, so close to a sketch on “Chappelle’s Show,” and gets his messy message across.
“Let me ask you this, what is happening in Hollywood that a guy that tough will be on the street waving a gun, screaming, ‘They are trying to kill me,’ ” Chappelle says, referring to the incident several years ago in which Lawrence ran into traffic on Ventura Boulevard, shouting and waving a gun. “What’s going on? Why is Dave Chappelle going to Africa? Why does Mariah Carey make a $100-million deal and take her clothes off” on “Total Request Live”?
“A weak person cannot get to sit here and talk to you. Ain’t no weak people talking to you. So what is happening in Hollywood? Nobody knows. The worst thing to call somebody is crazy. It’s dismissive. ‘I don’t understand this person, so they’re crazy.’ That’s bull.... These people are not crazy, they’re strong people. Maybe the environment is a little sick.”
Actually, a few weeks earlier, Lawrence had given a simpler explanation: “I was high. I was smoking marijuana.”
Within Chappelle’s interesting rant, meanwhile, is a more meager question: What does any of this have to do with the Stanislavsky method or Lee Strasberg? For the record, are we still inside the Actors Studio? The show, begun by Lipton in 1994 as an outgrowth of his work as dean of the Actors Studio Drama School at New York’s New School, has over the years become a kind of witness protection program for celebrities, an interview show in which they can sit down for an hour and discuss their careers as if describing Michelangelo’s frescoes in an Italian cathedral.
As such, Lipton has long since been lampooned and/or cherished for the way he can intone the name of a movie as if it were a delicate natural resource and not, say, “Meet the Parents.” His show is still original for the way it actually manages to embarrass its guests with overstatement (half the time Lipton sounds like God), for the way it conjures a Hollywood that can crank out only classics.
And so with Chappelle, Lipton at the outset moves reverentially through the comedian’s body of screen work -- “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” “Getting In,” “Half-Baked,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Con Air,” “The Nutty Professor,” “Blue Streak.”
They are not movies, they are “such films as.” The interview doesn’t much touch on Chappelle’s method, and at two hours it’s longer than it needs to be.
But it proves an enduring point: Talk shows are vital image rehab centers, whether the context is a daytime confessional or the art of the master thespian.
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‘Inside the Actors Studio: Dave Chappelle’
Where: Bravo
When: 8 to 10 p.m. Sunday
Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)