“He’s the man that seeks out people and experience and knowledge and wants to touch it and feel it and be with it on the ground,” Stewart said at the Kennedy Center Sunday night, referring to the late chef and television host Anthony Bourdain, “so that he can then channel that for his art and redirect that back to you as something completely different and new.”
Chappelle, the longtime stand-up comedian and former television host, was celebrated as the 22nd recipient of the Mark Twain Prize, considered the top honor in comedy. Speakers who spanned the comedian’s decadeslong career in comedy testified to how far-reaching his influence has been: Bradley Cooper, Tiffany Haddish, Kenan Thompson, and Sarah Silverman were just some of the guests who described Chappelle as far ahead of his peers.
Much of the show was a tribute to the first part of Chappelle’s career, which included the Comedy Central show “Chappelle’s Show.” Debuting in 2003, it featured bits that are seen as canonical in the comedy world: about a black white supremacist, a black George W. Bush or a mock sports fantasy draft for different races.
The show “allowed Dave to be his entire self, to express his intellect, his anger, his morality, his silliness, his hypocrisy, his sadness, his blazing talent,” said Neal Brennan, a comedian who was a co-creator of the show and who gave a speech Sunday that brought Chappelle to tears.
Chappelle’s largely improvised show was so funny, Brennan said, that Chappelle “surprised himself by how funny he was.”
At the time, Chappelle was the rare black comedian with his own television platform. Several speakers told of how complicated it was early in Chappelle’s career to find acceptance.
Brennan remembered that when he was pitching “Chappelle’s Show” to television networks, one woman asked him why they needed Chappelle “when we have Chris Rock.”
“See, back then, there could only be one popular black comedian at a time,” Brennan said. “Unlike today, when there can be three.”
“Chappelle’s Show,” which lasted only three seasons, was revered for skits that commented on how black people were stereotyped and characterized by white people, often for white audiences. His discomfort with that dynamic in part led to his disappearance from the network and public life altogether, he admitted.
“Chappelle’s Show was a rare thing,” Brennan said Sunday. “It was a fully faceted document of a human being living in the United States of America while having the surreal experience of being born with black skin.”
The speakers on Sunday briefly alluded to a trip to South Africa that Chappelle took after quitting. They mentioned the relative anonymity he has since found in rural Ohio, where he owns acres of land and has hosted live music in cow barns.
In the years after he left television, Chappelle’s reclusiveness became almost mythological, his few public appearances receiving tabloid attention. Yet Sunday, it was only when Stewart spoke that Chappelle’s absence from public life was addressed at any length. Stewart cited Chappelle’s courage in walking away from a reported $50 million to continue making “Chappelle’s Show.”
The ceremony did little to explain the breaking point in Chappelle’s career and life. In highlight reels of Chappelle’s comedy, there was often at least a decadelong gap between jokes or scenes, highlighting his older, more challenging, more thrilling skit-based humor against his more recent and uneventful stand-up comedy.
The more recent comedy, including several Netflix specials, has resulted in a bevy of negative reviews from critics who say Chappelle lost his smart and progressive take on current events. He has called LGBTQ Americans “the alphabet people” and has fixated on the sexual transgressions of famous men, including joking about R. Kelly’s alleged misconduct.
But as Sunday’s program made clear, Chappelle keeps a towering reputation among peers.
Aziz Ansari, another stand-up comedian, said that Chappelle’s most creative material has often been found in the most secluded settings.
“My favorite Dave sets have got to be the sets that I don’t think anyone will ever get to see, small club shows that are super intimate that go late in the morning, 5-6 in the morning,” he said. Ansari said he had heard stories of comedy club employees alerting guests to car-towing, but the guests did not move.
“That’s how compelling this man can be,” Ansari said.
The ceremony Sunday, which also featured music performances from Mos Def, Erykah Badu and John Legend, functioned in part as a homecoming. Chappelle, the son of professors, first got attention as a teenager from Washington on the show “Star Search” and at small comedy clubs, where he was known as a prodigy, as several speakers noted. A marching band from his high school, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, opened the show.
Chappelle spoke at the end, smoking a signature cigarette, and said that comedy saved his life.
He thanked his mother, who was in the crowd, for teaching him the virtue of the African griot, the storytelling sage who functions as a kind of human library of oral histories.
He said that his mother attended his earliest shows, sleeping in the back of the room until he took the stage.
“Do you know how long that car ride is home?” he joked.
Knowing he had to give a more polished thank you to his eventual audience on PBS — the ceremony will air on Jan. 7 — Chappelle interrupted his acceptance speech to pose with a contrived grin next to the Mark Twain bust given to the award winner.
“I know they’re going to edit some of this out,” he said, using an expletive. “It’s been an honor. Thank you.”
This article originally appeared in
.