Dave Chappelle’s Wearing a Suit
Tags: Comedy, Satire, BlackLivesMatter, SNL, Dave Chappelle

Here’s the thing — you have to earn the right to tell those type of jokes. You can’t go to an open mic where the average set is five minutes and spend HALF of that time telling ONE joke. This is the equivalent to Biggie’s Number Ten rule, this is strictly for live men, not for freshmen.

Don’t be an asshole. Don’t assume you can get up and start telling these jokes before you even figured out how jokes work. That opening joke is Dave flexing on you mofos, trust.

Because what Chappelle does next, master fuckin’ class in rapid jokes. After taking two minutes….and twenty one seconds to tell one joke, he then hits you with three jokes in thirty seconds. If you’re just entering into stand-up, those are for you. That’s what you have to learn. Dave Chappelle has earned the right to tell one joke in how long….two minutes….and twenty seconds because we, the audience know that we’re in good hands. We know that we’ll be relieved of thinking deeply for a bit, that the valve will be released, that we’ll get three jokes; one, two, three — in thirty seconds.

But like I said, that’s just a release. Chappelle has an underlining theme here, a theme that we would know if this were a comedy special (the title would give it away) but this is an SNL monologue, chief. So we just have to keep up.

Chappelle has an underlying theme. For this next joke you have to understand how Quarantine has affected performers. I know. Most of us just assume that our favorite entertainers are just rolling in dough from their names alone. But no, dear reader, that isn’t the case. Their job, how they get the bulk of their money is performing. Sure, they may have multiple streams of income, and Al Hamdulilah, that’s good, but singers, rappers, and yes, comedians, make money from doing shows.

But venues have been closed since March. The NBA, they may be under their projections by billions but they are allowed to play and get some of it back. Same with the NFL, MLB, MLS, NASCAR, you name it, these billion dollar behemoths are still able to operate with their athletes as their pawns. Record labels are still getting fed by streaming as are the media conglomerates that own the licensing to The Chappelle Show, but the artist? SOL.

So back in June, Dave Chappelle tried something different. Utilizing the maximum amount of space around him in Yellow Springs, Ohio, he decided to hold a pop-up comedy series entitled Dave Chappelle & Friends: A Talk with Punchlines. Reading about it and the line-up (Common, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu) reminded me of that Chappelle Block Party from ‘04. But this jawn included guest appearances from comedians from Sarah Silverman to Chris Rock.

It was a ticketed affair. Performers made money, fans got entertained, there was social distancing, and you had instant-made tourism. Folks gotta eat, piss, shit, and sleep, right? Right. Win. Win. Wrong. Some local folks started complaining. Maybe they saw one Black person too many. Maybe they got a little scared. Who knows. What we do know is their complaints made their way to the Zoning Inspector, Richard Zopf, who claimed he was never notified about the shows, that Chappelle was using agricultural land for commercial use. Yeah.

Black folk know — we find a way around borders and barriers, white folk change the rules, make new borders, and move them damn barriers back. Dave Chappelle and nem jumped over all them middlemen and gatekeepers and got permission from the Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, a Yellow Springs native.

All of that — that’s your background.

He tells a series of jokes surrounding the incident, speaking to the absurdity of being too loud in a cornfield, the possibility of them having membership on Farmers Only, a, yes, you guessed it, a Farmer Dating site, and the joke that ties this story into his ongoing theme — the joke with the premise of some of his farmer neighbors watching SNL, recognizing him and yelping, “Honey, come quick, come quick, the guy from the grocery stores on television!” To which Chappelle replies, “no, you big dummy, the guy from the television show is at the grocery store.”

Masterful.

So is what he does next.