On a recent episode of Chappelle's Show, (Tuesdays, 10 and 10:30pm, Comedy Central) its star and host, Dave Chappelle, performed a sketch as a black George Bush (accompanied by, among others, comedian Jamie Foxx as Tony Blair and hip-hop icon Mos Def in place of then-CIA chief George Tenet). In Chappelle's skin, Bush is a unilateralist who rolls straight gangster-style, with a grimace etched on his face and the necessary contingent of anonymous thugs at his side at all times. As the Bush administration did in real life, Chappelle's Bush bases his case for war with Iraq on the phony evidence that its leaders bought “yellow cake” in Africa. In the sketch, however, the yellow cake is not the enriched uranium actually used to support the case for war, but literally yellow-colored cake wrapped in a napkin and presented as evidence that Saddam Hussein is capable of building weapons of mass destruction.
Chappelle mocks the flimsy evidence on which Bush based his case for war, as well as the President's arrogant dismissal of criticism. His Bush, in a tone reminiscent of Superfly, shouts down journalists and curses detractors, at one point telling the United Nations to “shut the fuck up” and stop accusing him of disrespect. Instead of bothering the United States, he suggests, the international body should “go sell some medicine, bitches!”
The sketch is one of the most biting political satires performed by a comedian in years. And while presidential parody is not new to comedy (Saturday Night Live has been mocking U.S. presidents for more than two decades), Chappelle's popular sketch-comedy show is groundbreaking material for a black comedian appealing to a mainstream audience. Chappelle does not shy away from using the n-word or profanity of all orders on his show -- language that until recently remained taboo on network television. In his “Black Bush” sketch, Chappelle curses or uses the term “nigger” more than a dozen times.
Though the n-word has lost some of its power to shock in recent years, much as it did in the early 1970s era of blaxploitation films, its use among black comedians crossing over to mainstream audiences has been, until Chappelle's Show, fairly rare. Historically, foul-mouthed black comedians have had their “bad nigger” routines, developed during their stand-up careers, and their “Negro minstrel” personas, employed (or, not infrequently, forced upon them) when they broke into the mainstream. Redd Foxx's X-rated repertoire gave way to the likable junkyard owner of Sanford & Son; The Richard Pryor Show tanked after four episodes in the fall of 1977, as NBC balked at the sort of material found on Pryor's 1974 album, That Nigger's Crazy. The same pattern can be seen more recently in Eddie Murphy's and Chris Rock's transitions from stand-up routines (the raw-lipped Delirious and Bigger and Blacker, respectively) to loud-mouthed but amicable starring roles in crossover films such as Beverly Hills Cop and Down to Earth.
But Chappelle's half-hour show, which recently ended its second season, is ignoring the distinction button-pushing black comedians have traditionally had to draw between their stand up and their mainstream material. Chappelle has consistently refused to dilute his work, gleefully playing everything from an ashy-lipped crack head to a black juror who refuses to convict a black celebrity. The first episode of Chappelle's Show featured arguably its raciest sketch. In it, a blind white supremacist, unaware that he is black, denounces all forms of “niggerdom” as he promotes his latest bigoted diatribe, Nigger Book. After finally discovering the truth of his identity, the character divorces his white wife for being a “nigger lover.” The word “nigger” is thrown around constantly, and is not once bleeped out. Comedy Central has allowed the word to be aired throughout the show.
Chappelle made a name for himself in Washington, D.C.'s stand-up scene at the tender age of 14, but didn't truly arrive until his starring role in the 1998 cult classic Half Baked, a film about a group of potheads trying to bail a friend out of jail by selling copious amounts of weed. Now 30, he frequently betrays his D.C. roots by twisting his words with a characteristic Chocolate City twang. In 1998 he told Daily Variety, a trade publication, that he walked away from discussions with Fox about a pilot project because executives wanted his proposed show to have more white characters and a softer overall tone.
Before Chappelle's Show, the n-word hadn't shown up so often in one place since Quentin Tarantino employed the epithet in films such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Tarantino caught flack from black Hollywood standouts such as Denzel Washington and Spike Lee for allegedly misappropriating the term. Similarly, black Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy was chastised by a number of cultural critics and academic colleagues for supposedly endorsing the resurgence of the word in his popular book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Vintage, 2002).
Yet Chappelle has neither flinched from saying “nigger” nor been criticized for doing so. Just as a general American numbness toward audacity has been cultivated by everything from The Simpsons to Nip/Tuck, a growing number of black comedians, as well as many hip-hop artists, have shaken mainstream audiences' hesitance to embrace racially charged humor. Chappelle is leading the pack.
The popularity of Chappelle's Show is undeniable. It is the second-most popular show on Comedy Central (scoring a particularly high proportion of the much sought-after 18- to 35-year-old audience), and among the highest-rated original series on basic cable. It has also increased black viewership of Comedy Central by 300 percent, while its audience has grown more than 55 percent in the last year. Since its release in February, the DVD of the show's first season has sold more than 800,000 copies.
Surprisingly, issues of authenticity and cultural legitimacy have not been raised by critics or viewers, as they usually are when race is involved. The fact that neither Chappelle's wife (who is Asian-American) nor his primary writing partner, Neil Brennan (who is white), are black has not attracted criticism. In online forums, fans make plain their disinterest in picking Chappelle's identity apart. When a black woman in one forum took offense to Chappelle presenting his wife as black in most sketches (in one, his real-life wife plays herself), fans of various backgrounds shouted her down.
Some, such as Slate's Matt Feeney, have argued that Chappelle exploits stereotypes, rather than subverting them. Yet Chappelle also comments on the changing nature of racial attitudes and the bitter ironies that arise as a consequence of ignorance. In the sketch about the blind, black white supremacist, the main character calls a group of white teens bumping hip-hop in their car “niggers,” assuming, given their musical tastes, that they are black. The teens, unaware that he meant to insult them, celebrate as he is driven off, ecstatic that a black man would esteem them with such a compliment. The sketch is the first by any comedian to capture the one-eighty that the epithet has taken in recent years. The laughs it evoked also pointed to the changing ear mainstream audiences have for black comedy.
Alex P. Kellogg is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
