Dave Chappelle has come back from eight months out of the public eye, being called crazy and from turning down $50 million.
He’s just finished a nine-city stand-up tour, the world in which he feels most comfortable, in Philadelphia this week.
“This is the perfect way to come back,” Chappelle said on Tuesday.
He also has a concert movie, “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” opening Friday. It takes the brilliance of Chappelle’s live act and mixes it up with some of his favorite musicians.
It was filmed before he said goodbye to the $50 million.
It would make sense that Chappelle would re-establish himself back in his stand-up roots, especially after the year he’s had.
After spending two years producing, writing and starring in “Chappelle’s Show,” the wildly successful sketch series for Comedy Central, the 32-year-old comic bolted last year in the midst of a two-year, $50 million deal for reasons many of his fans still can’t fathom.
His tour is a live version of “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” a concert documentary filmed by director Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) that features the comedian’s favorite artists–Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Big Daddy Kane, the Roots, Jill Scott, Common, Kanye West, John Legend, Dead Prez and The Fugees.
More Top Picks Best Push Sweepers
But it’s the non-concert stuff that is the most engaging: Chappelle cracking jokes off-camera with a drums-playing Mos Def, picking out a surprisingly serviceable rendition of “Round Midnight” on the piano, trading comedic riffs with his set-up man, Ahmir ” estlove” Thompson of the Roots.
Cameras follow Chappelle as he wanders around his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio. He distributes “golden tickets” to random residents–the woman who works at the convenience store where he buys his cigarettes, a pair of teenage golfers, the entire Central State University marching band–for his concert, which takes place in a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Chappelle used a nearby Brooklyn day-care center as his headquarters, the same center that slain rapper Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., attended.
Shot over five days in September 2004, “Block Party” is equal parts concert movie and social commentary as seen through Chappelle’s comic lens.
“We were hoping to define an era and a community without being too lecturing–to show people having a good time,” Gondry says. “On camera and off, Dave is charming. I thought it would be good to follow him around with a camera because he generates so much warmth.”
During filming, Gondry says, he noticed his star was under pressure. Seven months later, in April 2005, Chappelle went AWOL from his own TV show with no explanation–not even to his closest handlers.
There were rumors that he was on drugs, in therapy or downright crazy. Turns out he spent two weeks in Durban, South Africa, on what he described to Time magazine as a “spiritual retreat.” He spent the rest of the year at the Yellow Springs farm where he lives with his wife and two children.
Before he exited the show, Chappelle taped enough sketches for roughly four episodes, which Comedy Central plans to air in July. A spokesman said the network would be thrilled to have Chappelle back.
When told that, Chappelle, who had said previously that he was uncertain whether or not he would return, declared: “If they do air those shows, I will be so [bleeped] off that it will be over. They have a contractual right, but they know those were not the shows I was happy with … I say, boycott!”