Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Entering the Show 4

Chapter 2: Chappelle’s “Br’er Rabbitting“ the Minstrel Mode 11

Chapter 3: Stereotypes 20

Chapter 4: The Pixies, Dave Chappelle and the Double Consciousness 32

Chapter 5: Language and Profanity 41

Conclusion 48

Introduction

“Any text about African-American culture written by a white man, is obviously problematic. I cannot hope to escape the possibility that some of what follows – or even all of it – is racist.”

- CRISPIN SARTWELL

I will never forget the first time I watched Chappelle’s Show. Dave introduced his audience to a 1950s white family whose last name happened to be “Niggar”. The skit is performed in black and white, with a set reminiscent of the popular American TV sitcom, Leave It to Beaver. The “Niggars” are a squeamishly clean family of aw-shucks pleasantness and downright puerile gullibility, an idealized version of the 1950s in middle class America. The skit begins with a theme song introducing the family: “N-I-G-G-A-R, it's the Niggar Family. We all know, who they are, Frank, Tim, and Emily. Teaching Tim how to ride a bike, these are the Niggars that we like. N-I-G, G-A-R, it's the Niggar Family, it's the Niggar Family.” (Chappelle’s show [CS], 2005: Season 2 Episode 2 [S02 E02])

“The Niggar-family” skit hinges upon the interaction among the members of a primarily white community. Plenty of opportunities to touch on black stereotypes present themselves throughout the skit.

[1^st scene: breakfast table in a 1950's-sitcom home]

Emily Niggar: Breakfast is served!
Frank Niggar: Look, hon, my sister just had another baby. Look at this little bundle of joy!
Emily: She's got those Niggar lips.
Frank: I know, so thin! Is Tim still asleep?
Emily: I think so.
Frank: He sure is one lazy Niggar!

[2^nd scene: breakfast table in another 50's-sitcom home]
Mrs. Halsted: Jenny has a date tonight with the Niggar boy from school.
Mr. Halsted: What?! Oh, god, no!!
Jenny Halsted: No, Daddy, that's his name: Timmy Niggar.
Mr. Halsted: Oh, of course. That Niggar boy — he's a very good athlete, and so well-spoken. That family's going places. I mean, we're rich; they're Niggar-rich.

“The Niggar Family” sketch left me rolling on the floor. However, in retrospect I began to analyze my immediate reaction toward it. I found myself perplexed and somehow ashamed. Had I simply been laughing at a white family with an odd last name or had I just unintentionally exposed my true inner racist? I began to scrutinize, my thought process pertaining to race, trying to expose any possible racist notions. This paper is an extension of my scrutiny.

I know my interest in the field of African-American popular culture combined with my possible inner racist attitudes may arouse suspicion. However honourable my intentions, if one was to accuse me of being racist he may not be completely wrong. My interest in this field and my fascination with something that differs so strongly from the cultural environment I grew up in could be racist in and of itself. Still, I hope not to be confused with those who show their admiration through emulation perhaps better described by the term “Negrotarian” as coined by Zora Neal Hurston (qtd. in Strausbaugh 192).

As the introductory quote shows; White American writer Crispin Sartwell faced a problem very similar to mine. In his African-American study Act Like You Know Sartwell cites Houston Baker: “For a white person to write about African-American life and popular culture would be colonializing and disingenuous” (Sartwell 7). This quote evoked in me feelings of guilt and apprehension – an anxiety that in the process of analyzing pieces of African-American (popular) culture my white voice might eventually assume and exert oppressive powers over black Americans again. Which is why, I will follow Sartwell’s advice and try to remain visible in the text, instead of disguising my voice with a particularly divine academic tone (5-10).

Given the fact that I am not an authority on African-American studies I want to look at my thesis as a great opportunity to personally encounter Chappelle’s Show as a vivid part of African-American popular culture that so far I have only read about rather than depicting it in a “colonializing and disingenuous” way. Therefore I will not try to hide my white-German-point-of-view, but make and keep my voice and preoccupations visible. Moreover my visibility is not only due to the fact that I am approaching new ground from an all white location, but is also strongly connected with the challenging messages of Chappelle’s Show. On the show Dave Chappelle resists supremacist society with a blunt arsenal of wit. To watch the show is to peer into a side of society often overlooked in mainstream media.

The discomfort I felt when I thought about “The Niggar Family” piece is nothing exclusive and probably a lot more intense to those who actually live in the American society that is so frequently targeted by Chappelle. This paper is supposed to help acknowledging how important it is to face our own racism and it is about revealing where and how we get hit by Chappelle’s modes of resistance.

I will start my analysis by reconsidering what the show is, how it works and how it was and still is perceived. Furthermore, I will analyze the different layers of the show’s modes of resistance and provide different perspectives to their controversial content, by putting them into the historical context of some of the most influential and diverse movements of African-American culture – e.g. black- and whiteface minstrelsy, Harlem Renaissance, Blaxploitation etc. In addition, I will examine the effects of Chappelle’s Show on an audience that appears to be divided and intimidated when confronted with Chappelle’s multifaceted and racially charged African-American humor.

Chapter One

Entering the show

“Alright, you all. Now everybody have seat. Let’s all relax. Welcome to Chappelle’s Show. You know, we got a little flack from the press. I don’t know if any of you guys have seen some things that were written? Calling us controversial. Which I was surprised about, that’s the thing about bein’ on TV you just never can say what you wanna’ say. If I said everything I thought, it would just freak America out. You wouldn’t wanna hear ‘ young black dude sayin’ half the things I’ve been thinkin’!”

-DAVE CHAPPELLE

Chappelle’s Show broadens the ideas of African-American humor to an extent that some consider detrimental or at least highly controversial, while others see it as liberating and savagely funny. Some accuse Dave Chappelle of reversing racism against whites by irresponsibly stereotyping.

After the show premiered in January 2003 the critiques were undecided whether they should join in on the laughter or wince at Chappelle’s use of racial material and stereotypes. While Time Magazine found the show to be a “fresh, satiric take on race, sex and pop culture that's often profane, sometimes profound, always provocative--and incredibly popular”, Comedy Network reacted rather cautiously: “Chappelle's unique point-of-view on the world provides a hilarious, defiant and sometimes dangerous look at American culture.”

The show challenges to break conventional views on race relations, domestic violence and homosexuality by employing a cutting edge humor ranging from rural and urban folklore to mime and burlesque. Dave Chappelle crosses lines and unleashes his humor with virtually no restrains.

“The Niggar Family” sketch progresses with many more absurd situations in which the infamous “N-word” is applied to the white family, but in the end milkman Clifton (Dave Chappelle) drops the Happy Darky mask when he breaks out into a bitter laugh and falling out of his role sighs: “Oooh-wee! Oh, Lord; this racism is just killin' me inside.” It was at that point I had to take a deep breath and came to realize that Chappelle’s black humor should not be mistaken as mild or superficial after all.

What’s so special about Chappelle’s “black” humor and what purpose does it serve? Mel Watkins in his work of African-American Humor, On the Real Side describes the laughter and the humor of black people as a mystery, a dilemma that has been greeted with puzzlement and that still incites confusion, consternation and anxiety among whites (1994). It appears as though viewing African Americans laughing at black humor, to a great extent, induces shame and guilt in white audiences. Watkins reported on several cases in which White Americans expressed their astonishment of black laughter, caused of course by black humor. “Astonishment” is an understatement to the complexity of feelings that black humor evokes. White people at times feel so insecure and anxious at the sound of Black laughter because they suspect some form of resistance – a resistance that is directly related to their oppressive behaviour. Black humor and laughter renders the injustice of (white) supremacy visible to the oppressor. Black laughter breaks the norms of white dominance, because it wilfully and provocatively reflects the oppressed black soul. The bittersweet release of societal pressure not only gives whites a window into a world they can’t experience but perhaps more intriguingly an unexpected picture of themselves. An account of this sort of laughter and its motivation is offered by David Inglis’ discussing Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin:

Although Bakhtin was referring to medieval society and the importance of carnival celebrations within it, his views are to an extent generalizable to all human societies. Bakhtin argued that culture is separated into two mutual antagonistic realms, ‘the serious and the laughing aspect[s]’ The ‘serious’ world is made up of officialdom, dominant groups and classes, […] ‘high culture’[…]. These seek to control […]. The broad masses of the people, far from passively accepting the ideas and values of dominant groups, are […] often mocking and laughing at what they see as the pompous attitudes and activities of their social superiors. Following this line of thought, there is such a thing as genuinely ‘popular’ culture; it is to be found in the habitual mocking of authority and sly anti-establishment humour of the lower classes and the socially disenfranchised. (103)

Bakhtin reveals to me the reason for my discomfort at Chappelle’s bitter laughing in “The Niggar Family” skit. I felt mocked and caught red-handed while enjoying my own racism. Haunted by suspicion of my own hidden racism I assumed that there must be more to the laugh that somehow made me the butt of the joke.

I came to realize that everything Chappelle targets at his audience is cloaked in mocking satire. The next few chapters will expand on the idea that Chappelle’s primordial joke is on white society, note however, Chappelle’s humor is a powerful weapon of resistance against any kind of prejudice or oppression.

Everything about Chappelle’s Show is satirical, “not Mad magazine satirical, but Orwellian dystopic.” (Beatty 2) It is the satirical element that makes many of the shows messages more palatable. Chappelle’s satiric comedy creates a link to the past – especially to the unsavoury truths of white/black relations. Still, the gap Chappelle’s comedy inevitably enforces is at times exposed to be an illusion by the satire inherent to his humor. “Black humor most often satirizes the demeaning views of non-blacks, celebrates the unique attributes of community life, or focuses on outwitting the oppressor – as it were, “getting over” (Watkins, Real Side 29).

When necessary Chappelle’s finely tuned satire cuts through to the core of sugar-coated, easy-to-digest comedy and hits his target with accuracy and intelligence. Ralph Ellison considered this kind of humor the possibility to escape the surroundings that were established by the oppressor’s lies, “so we developed a style of humor which recognized the basic artificiality, the irrationality, of the actual arrangement” (Watkins, Real Side 31). Inherent to this style of humor is “the maze of double and reverse meanings … intentional obfuscation that since slavery had to be translated” (Watkins, Real Side 494). I want to try and translate some of the things Chappelle did on his show.

Facts

When the series Chappelle’s Show premiered in January 2003 on the U.S cable television network Comedy Central its tremendous success was not foreseeable. During the first two seasons the show became the second highest rated show on the network. The DVD sets for the first and second season have sold extraordinarily well, with season 1 being the best-selling TV show on DVD of all-time in the US, beating out The Simpsons, Friends and even Seinfeld. Chappelle left the show and a contract worth $50 million while they were already shooting the third season. Later he appeared on Oprah Chappelle explained that his leaving the show wasn’t about the money so much as everything that came with it. “He spoke of a white man laughing in a way that made him uncomfortable with the direction that his career had taken (Cobb 248). Chappelle might have thought his show had started to play into stereotypes rather than making fun of them.

Dave Chappelle wrote and produced his show with only his white co-writer Neal Brennan. The cable television giant Comedy Central granted him an extraordinary amount of control over the show perhaps unusual so. Even the producers of South Park and The Simpsons were held responsible for the content of their shows in regular evaluation sessions.

Shot with only a small supporting cast (Jonathan Corbett, Sophia Brown, Kyle Grooms, veteran comedian and former writer to Richard Pryor Paul Mooney and Eddie Murphy’s brother Charlie) and very simple set aesthetics (a plain stage surrounded by the audience in a half circle) Dave Chappelle’s Show mainly consists of previously taped, mostly unrelated sketches only interrupted by the hosts introducing monologues. Musical guests on Chappelle’s show are primarily Rap, Hip-Hop and Soul Music artists like Mos Def, Common, Kanye West, Talib Kweli, Snoop Dog, DMX, Erykah Badu, Anthony Hamilton etc. – their performances emphasize the show’s roots in Vaudeville and music hall traditions. Instead of shying away from these folkloristic conventions, that are strongly connected with the blackface minstrelsy phenomenon, Dave Chappelle reconquers parts of his cultural heritage by strategically employing modes and characters hinting at the minstrel tradition as well as black- and whiteface acts.

Aims

This analysis mostly concentrates on exploring Chappelle’s racial implications, therefore it is necessary to evaluate the principal concepts of race and ethnicity and the way these concepts are used and applied by Chappelle.

In their sociological study of Ethnicity and Race Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann define both race and ethnicity as social constructs. By doing so, they already cut the ground from under racist feet, who built their racist believe on the foundation that their white supremacy and superiority is justified by natural force and not by social processes. Cornell and Hartmann discredit the belief that “[…] races are genetically distinct subpopulations of a given species” (21). This opinion is supported by Robert Jensen who quotes the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to proof that race as a biological concept is mere myth.

With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge… it has become clear that human population are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics indicates that most physical variation, about 94 percent, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6 percent of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them.” (15)

From the very beginning of his show Chappelle makes clear that he also doesn’t believe in race as a genetic or naturally given predestination and chooses to apply the more substantial and less fraught concept of “ethnicity” to describe diversity.

You know, I’m glad that there are so many different people here. For you at home, you see in wide shot [with a movement of his arm he indicates an overall perspective]; it looks like a bunch of black people. But it’s not! It’s a patchwork, a multicultural, multiethnic patchwork. Now, America is the same way. (CS S01 E05)

Now the question is what Chappelle is referring to when he talks about ethnicity and ethnic groups? Is it Richard A. Schermerhorns definition of an ethnic group as quoted by Cornell and Hartmann, “a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood” (19). Or is he simply replacing the concept of “race” with the term “ethnicity”?

Another sketch of Season Two Uncensored called “White People Dancing” shows Chappelle doubting the stereotype that White people can’t dance, so he brings musical guest John Mayer, QuestLove and Ahmir Kalib to play with that stereotype (CS, 2004: S2 E3). The skit ends with all kinds of ethnicities (including Dave Chappelle) dancing to one song performed by white guitar player John Mayer. One scene in the sketch I think is of special importance when trying to find out what Dave Chappelle means by the term “ethnic”, is when John Mayer starts performing his White song in front of a Black police officer who instantly starts dancing. Dave Chappelle looks in disbelieve at the Black officer and asks him: “My man, how come you know that song?” The officer responds, “Man, I can’t help it, I’m from the suburbs!” Chappelle thinks for a moment, shrugs his shoulders and begins to dance.

The ending scene especially illustrates that Chappelle regards ethnicity as a concept that is not dependant on genes or natural force. His ethnicity is much like Schermerhorns; a concept that is open to social changes and ascription from the outside. Ethnicity for Chappelle is an ever-changing construction. Just because he is Black does not automatically mean he does not like electric-guitar music or dancing like Bruce Springsteen. Being brought up in the suburbs himself, Chappelle is well aware that the power of “‘blood ties’, ‘People hood’ and ‘common origin’ to form unique sets of interpersonal, ethnic bonds is not inherent. It [the power] lies in the significance human beings attach to them, a significance that is variable and contingent and altogether a human creation” (Cornell, Hartmann 89)

This freedom to attach and detach to different forms of black experience enables Chappelle to playfully transform his show into a platform where we get to witness the interaction of white and black stereotypes that lead to a revealing and certainly funny discussion about race-relation. Watching and reconsidering the universe of Chappelle’s Show will offer an opportunity to learn about ourselves and how we are perceived. When Stephane Dunn reports on Newblackman.Blogspot that the American writer and poet James Lipton described Chappelle as “a medium that revealed black People to whites in ways they missed” (“Truth Chappelle Style”), he alludes to the misperception that both the Black and the White side have in common (Strausbaugh 36). But I think he is mistaken in one point. Chappelle’s Show is not about presenting anything, it is not a program selling out the truth about blackness. Instead of presenting black culture in the token black man way of the whites, Chappelle offers us the possibility to question our prejudiced and stereotyped views on “otherness” in general and on “blackness” in particular.

Really coming face to face with the reality of black lives could only proceed if we came face to face with ourselves….The only way to reveal to ourselves what disguises ourselves from ourselves is to hear you [the Black voice] speak….Black folks wouldn’t countenance the sort of stuff we white folks believe about ourselves, but we white folks can’t allow ourselves to know what black folks know about us. That is why our only hope for ceasing to be oppressors is to listen to what black folks are saying about us. (Sartwell 81- 83)

Exposure to Chappelle’s Show offers the opportunity to learn about our own misperception of the “other”, instead of being taught about it. I think it is one of the shows most important premises that it’s not Chappelle’s wish or subject to teach about himself, but that he teaches us about ourselves.

Chapter Two

Chappelle’s “Br’er Rabbitting“ the Minstrel Mode

"Let he who is without sin throweth the first rock, and I shalt smoketh it!"

- TYRONE BIGGUMS

“It's trouble that makes the monkey chew on hot peppers.”

-AFRICAN PROVERB

Chappelle’s Show starts with an image alluding to the (blackface) minstrel tradition. In front of a white background two Black musicians perform a song. While playing they sing the two words “Chappelle’s Show” in succession. The old musician is standing up playing the mouth harp and the other one is playing the guitar while he sits on a chair. From the left side of the screen Dave enters into the white realm and picks up the guitar players howling, “OUUHOO” and with a “OHO” on his lips leaves the picture to the right.

The melody and the way the two black musicians are dressed (imagine the rags of a slave in the old south) are strong reminders of the minstrel era, when Blacks were portrayed and lampooned in stereotypical and often disparaging ways: as ignorant, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, joyous, and musical. The first association with minstrelsy becomes a certainty during the commercial breaks. To the sound of the guitar the mouth harpist together with Dave Chappelle do some shuffling. Together they “Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so (Kenrick, musical101.com)” And by doing just so, they literally jump Jim Crow.

Chappelle’s playing with the black stereotype (the minstrel) exposes the misperception of blacks by whites. The minstrel is a grotesque projection of the Negro image, which was substantially shaped by blackface popular culture. Both, before and after the Civil War whites insisted upon an image of the Negro that would fit him for a place in plantocracy. The buffoonish minstrel served that purpose.

The fact that Chappelle’s style is not adapting to the minstrel image is emphasizing the change that has taken place. While the black minstrels had to put on their blackface masks to subtly poke fun at the racist attitudes and double standards, for Chappelle being funny and shuffling around is no longer a mask he has to hide behind to bring across a message. For him it doesn’t matter whether or not he puts on a mask; with his own show he finally has the chance to get into peoples faces without having to be in disguise. Chappelle’s discourse is no longer restricted; neither by the past nor by the future.

By acting out the most racist American archetypes (and the minstrel is definitely one of them) Chappelle brings back to mind the roots of white racism only to ridicule them and expose them as lies. Chappelle’s shuffling like Jim Crow is actually reviving Jim Crow and the heritage of T.D. Rice and the minstrel era with a modern slant.

The show opens twice though. After the two black musicians Chappelle is being introduced over a riff from the song Hip Hop, from the album Let's Get Free by Dead Prez. Both black blackface minstrelsy and Hip Hop are parts of the African-American discourse.

“…music is the founding discourse of the African-American experience. Indeed, African music is the founding discourse of the Diaspora, and that is probably as it should be (Sartwell 159-160)” The two separate introductions to the show are the reminders of the long road the black voice has travelled to be able to express itself in African-American discourse. At the same time the intros serve as a framework for Chappelle to deliver his message covering everything from slavery and African-American popular culture, to blackface minstrelsy and Hip Hop.

Closely connected to the blackface minstrel’s attitude is the concept of the trickster. The tricksters are characters who in minstrel shows and Trickster Tales managed to get the better of their situations.

Nehemiah a clever but lazy slave was approached by his cruel master “You are going to pick four hundred pounds of cotton today!”

“Wal, Massa, dat’s aw right,” Nehemiah answered, “but ef Ah meks you laff, won’ you lemme off fo’ today?”

“Well,” said the master, “if you make me laugh, I’ll give you your freedom.”

“Ah decla’, Boss,” said Nehemiah, “yuh sho’ is a good lookin’ man.”

“I’m sorry I can’t say the same thing about you,” retorted the slave master

“Oh, yes, Boss, yuh could,” Nehemiah laughed out, “yuh could if yuh tole ez big uh lie ez Ah did.” The slave master laughed before he thought and Nehemiah was free. (Watkins, 2002: 24)

One of the tricksters coming directly from the minstrel years (around 1845) is Br’er Rabbit who was the central figure in Joel Chandler Harris’ famous Uncle Remus stories. Uncle Remus is a kindly old slave who serves as a heterodiegetic storytelling device, passing on the folktales of Br’er Rabbit to the (white) children gathering around him. It seems reasonable to suppose that Br’er Rabbit represents the black slave who uses his wits to overcome circumstances and to exact revenge on his adversaries (Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox), representing the white slave-owners. This reading of the Uncle Remus characters probably has to do with the word “Br’er”, which is phonetically transcribed into “Brother” – since slavery blacks have constructed and established their ethnic boundaries by addressing each other with the term “brother”. However, just like Br’er Rabbit Dave Chappelle is a multi-dimensional character. Both Br’er Rabbit and Chappelle seem to innocently suggest solutions to certain problems, but actually they both trick and outwit everybody may they be friend or foe. Chappelle may be a (anti-) hero most of the time, but his amoral nature and lack of any positive restraint can make him a villain as well. In a skit from the Lost Episodes he gets back at people that have hurt him or harmed his career at some point in the past. One of these people is the owner of a comedy club Steve Barker who had fired Dave Chappelle many years ago. Just when Dave Chappelle is about to set the club on fire Steve approaches him in a wheel chair. Chappelle learns that Steve had been involved in a terrible car accident and on top of that he asks Dave to forgive him for having kicked him out of the club.

Steve: “I’m really glad you came here today, because I’ve been wanting to apologize to you for years. Banning you from the club was the biggest mistake I ever made. I know, this doesn’t mean anything to you, but I just want you to know that I’m sorry. And I always knew from the bottom of my heart, that you were going to make it.”

Dave: Oh man, Steve. I came here to get revenge on you man.

Steve: You did?

Dave: Yeah, I was going to burn your club down. You don’t smell that gas? I know that was wrong, but I was just so mad at you for banning me. I’m sorry man. All that years I walked around with that weight and now you lifted it. Thank you… thank you

[Dave bends down to Steve and hugs him. Then still thanking he whispers into Steve’s ear]

Dave: Thank you, thank you, thank you… for making this depth much sweeter. Son of a bitch!

[He grabs the wheelchair, pushes it down the stairs, sets the club on fire. Back on the street – the club is exploding in the background – with soothing words he takes a baby from the hands of its mother and kicks it into the air like a soccer ball. Before the scene fades to black we see Dave Chappelle laughing his head off] (CS S03 E01)

The gentle whispering of “thank you” before killing Steve and the soothing of the mother before kicking her baby is very much exemplary for the overall strategy Chappelle uses to get a hold of his audience.

Chappelle’s appearance, his body language, his voice and the way he talks, all these things do in no way suggest the sharpness of comedy he announces. He soothes his audience into following him to places where they normally wouldn’t go. Just like Br’er Rabbit Chappelle hides his indisputably sophisticated, sharp humor behind a mask of immaturity. “Apart from the five minutes… of brilliance on Chappelle’s Show” (Beatty, 6) the audience is lulled into a false sense of security by a mainstream humor including enough feces, gratuitous violence and sex to appeal to even the most unpretentious minds. This includes breasts popping out of blouses, a skit-series called “Great moments in Hook-up history” and the children’s song Diarrhea. Dave Chappelle performs this song (which actually comes from Steve Martins film Parenthood) with a group of choir that sing the song with rather graphic lyrics while Dave Chappelle acts as a conductor, wildly waving his wand as the singers pass from line to line. The song was Dave’s initial response to People magazine which accused his show of being immature.

Dave: Recently, People Magazine said that my show was immature… Something like that. I don’t know why they would say that I’m immature, but if you think that my show was immature, then I would like to dedicate this next piece to whoever wrote that article at People.

When you’re swimming in the pool and your feeling something cool

Diarrhea, Diarrhea

When you’re climbing up that ladder and you’re feeling something splatter

Diarrhea, Diarrhea

When you’re eating chocolate mousse and your bowels just let loose

Diarrhea, Diarrhea, that’s wet

[…]

When you’re running down that track and it oozes down your crack

Diarrhea, Diarrhea

When you’re with the one you love and you feel that hot mud butt

Diarrhea

Pieces like the “Diarrhea Song” build common ground for a diverse audience. They are what Watkins calls “integrated jokes”. “An “integrated” joke is finally one in which, momentarily at least, black comic and white audience function in an equitable “we” relationship” (Watkins, 1994: 495). The “Popcopy” sketch is another example for integrated jocularity. Chappelle plays the manager in a Popcopy store training tape. The tape shows future Popcopy employees how to behave and essentially offend and mistreat the customers. Anyone who has ever been to a big chain copy store can relate. Sketches like “Popcopy” and “The Diarrhea Song” include everybody in the humor “[…] instead of, as in much black circuit comedy, excluding whites by their focussing on inside humor or making them the object of the joke (Watkins, 1994: 495). Stripping away racial or political material these sketches establish mutual trust relationships among diversities simply by pointing out that there are experiences that almost everybody shares. Chappelle’s integrated joking tricks his audience into also trustingly soaking up controversial and affecting material, like the sketch about the Black White Supremacist Clayton Bigsby. Made to believe by his foster caretakers that he was white, Bigsby grew up to be one of the leading Ku Klux Klan spokespersons and white supremacy propaganda writer, all the while never realizing his true self as he spouts off such tirades as "America's at war with Al Qaeda, but we're still losing the war against Al Sharpton!" When he finally finds out the truth he divorces his wife, because “she is a Nigger-Lover.”

Soothing or tricking an audience into false security as foreplay to actual resistance is not Chappelle’s invention though. Black narrative always had to find ways to get their messages across without being too straightforward or offensive. “Early slave narratives were published with documents attesting to the trustworthiness of the narrators. To be heard, the narratives had to be authorized… by white people” (Sartwell 22). To bypass white censorship black writers thought of many tactics, one of which was what I will now refer to as “soothing”.

In his poem “Heritage” Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen uses images and colors that comfort the reader and the monotonous rhythms the words create sound much like a lullaby.

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

(University of Virginia. Electronic Text Center)

The reader is safe. There is no threat in these lines. No sign of the black man rising in an accusing position. Even the opposite is the case, for Cullen puts some stereotypes on the scene as well. Men are black noble savages (“Strong bronzed men, or regal black”) the women fertile and of an innocent sexuality (“Women from whose loins I sprang”). The reader has finally entered the (black) Garden of Eden.

But peace and quietness come to an unexpected end when the poet continues with an undertone that is co-vibrating with minatory behaviour.

My conversion came high-priced.

I belong to Jesus Christ,

Preacher of humility

While the drowsy reader still tries to make sense of these lines, which in tone and color obviously differ from the picture of paradise, Cullen has already started taking revenge on the god in whose name his suffering was justified.

“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”,

So I make an idle boast;

Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,

Lamb of God, although I speak

With my mouth thus, in my heart

Do I play a double part.

Daring even to give You

Dark despairing features where,

Crowned with dark rebellious hair,

Patience wavers just so much as

Mortal grief compels, while touches

Quick and hot, of anger, rise

To smitten cheek and weary eyes.

Like a thunderstorm these angry words overwhelm the recipient of the poem. Before white eyes the formerly god given supremacy (Authorized King James Version, Eph. 6,5: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”) is exposed as idle double moral standard. The white worldview crumbles and we haven’t even seen it coming. That is the power of soothing. A process that starts with reading, or in Chappelle’s case watching, and all the sudden, while the most of us are still sleeping or laughing, it triggers an earthquake that is able to shake and destroy our prejudiced views.

With “Heritage” Cullen also ridicules the white desire for “primitive” culture. Whites were interested in so-called inferior, "primitive" cultures, as many whites viewed black American culture at that time, and wanted to experience this "primitivism" in the work coming out of the Harlem Renaissance.

“Heritage” plays with stereotypes by confirming them in the beginning. The former slave is conceived as “a raw, cultureless material mined from the dark continent …” (Sartwell 21). But Cullen disperses the stereotype of the primitive black by revealing his suffering soul (Whites had been debating whether or not Blacks even had a soul) and his individual feelings. In doing so attacks the, “New Negro,” the foundation of white American culture, their faith and the self-conception of being God’s chosen, morally superior people that is directly derived from a selective reading of the bible. “Heritage” must have been a slap in the face of his white readers.

In the end blackface is not that different from soothing altogether, both techniques depend on disguise and deception. Having the chance to spread white racist views the white (and later the black) blackface artists used their corked-up faces to express their resistance and say things publicly, which would not have been possible without the mask. “In his remarkable book Raising Cain, historian W.T. Lhamon, Jr., has proposed that one useful way to think of early minstrelsy is as an outbreak of rebellious youth culture, not unlike the early years of rock & roll or rap in the next century” (Strausbaugh 72-73). Of course this rebellious outbreak that Lhamon refers to is entirely white, but Strausbaugh mentions that when black blackface artists entered the stages they were using their masks as subversive resistance as well.

“The cakewalk is one of those intriguing confluences of Black and White American cultures. Blacks on plantations had developed it as a satire of their white masters. Their backs stiffly arched, their butts held tight, their elbows high and their knees kicking high, they strutted, bowed, and twirled their canes in a blatant parody of the way tight-assed, stiff-necked White folks moved.” (105)

One reason for Chappelle to employ the minstrel mode and its demeaning stereotypes is that he wants to regain control of the images that had been used in the most humiliating ways against Blacks. R. Ellison said, “…by changing the joke, they may slip the joke” (qtd. in Nichols 107). Chappelle’s Show is the witty retort to the minstrelsy popular culture that has created a sustaining image of the African-American. Refraining from bitterly assessing guilt Dave Chappelle reverses the worst elements of the minstrel mode and draws on current (racial) issues to dictate art, in contrast to blackface minstrelsy which would do the exact opposite by letting art dictate society’s views (Rubin 155). Chappelle “Br’er Rabbits” the minstrel mode – he gets the better of a doubtful popular culture.

Chapter Three

Stereotypes

Knowing the reality of a society that had the power to treat you as though you were actually inferior, but knowing within yourself that you were not, you were thrown into a position in which you were either going to develop a sense of humor or… die of frustration.

- RALPH ELLISON

In this chapter I want to look at the strategic deployment of stereotypes and racial signifiers in Chappelle’s Show. In his show Chappelle often takes the stereotype and wields it directly, as a weapon. Chappelle’s use of stereotypes once more transforms a means of oppression into resistance, and does so in a way that makes the conceptual structure of that oppression absolutely clear (Sartwell 160). According to Gerd Reinholds “Soziologie-Lexikon” the term “stereotype” describes a pattern of behaviour and thinking that eventually leads to an oversimplification of persons and situations (Reinhold 651). This means that the stereotype for itself does not lead to racism, as it is not motivated by vicious preconceptions. Speaking in sociological terms, the stereotype is more of a structure that helps the individual to orientate within society, although it is very likely that the application of stereotypes will result in racism. When I talk about stereotypes then I am referring to racist stereotypes that whites have about blacks in the first place and only secondly about those that blacks have about whites.

All of the racist stereotypes I will be talking about have their origin in what Sartwell calls “ejected asceticism”; a concept that Whites have unconsciously established “to keep the Nigger runnin’” (Ellison 15). “White Americans practice the purification or the mortification of the body by ejecting the body imaginatively into black persons, who become associated with the physical per se: sport, sex, violence, and dance, for instance” (Sartwell 11). So, while Blacks become connected with instinctive behaviour and nature, whiteness denies its instincts and associates itself with civilization and culture. The “race dichotomy” therefore consists of the two mutually exclusive parts: (1) Black = Nature / (2) White = Mind.

The stereotype is obviously an instrument of white supremacy as it deliberatley dehumanizes and degrades blacks to an extend that forces them to duck and hide. Chappelle’s Show, by entering the public sphere as a vivid part of popular culture challenges that “race dichotomy”.

Since blacks are nature, they are not supposed to contribute to white culture. However, Chappelle goes even further, by reviving some of the most degrading stereotypes. Chappelle threatens the opppressive white system with its own violence. “[…] by magical reversal, the instrument of oppression, the stereotype , becomes – in the hands of those against whom it used – an instrument of resistance” (Sartwell 184).

The frequent use of the infamous N-word is one of the most controversial instruments of that resistance. The “Clayton Bigsby” sketch which was part of the very first episode of Chappelle’s Show. Chappelle introduces the skit: “Welcome back guys, We still haven’t been canceled yet, but I’m workin’ on it! And I think this next piece might be the one to do it. This is probably the wildest thing I have ever done in my career and I showed it to a black friend of mine and he looked at me as if I had set black people back for a comedy sketch…[he shruggs his shoulders]… sorry!” The skit starts with a warning that reads: “WARNING! For viewers sensitive to issues of race, be advised that the following piece contains gratuoitous use of the N-word. And by N-word, I mean Nigger. There, I said it.” The skit itself is the first "Frontline" sketch (a spoof on current affair programmes) and features the life of the blind supremacist Clayton Bigsby (played by Chappelle), who is not aware that he is actually a black man. This sketch brought Chappelle’s Show to gain significant notoriety for its racy content. Here are some examples:

[Frontline Host Kent Wallace and Bigsby’s bodyguard Jasper are in the gas station and Jasper is paying for gas, while Bigsby is waiting in the truck]

Kent Wallace: Sir, you're a friend. Why not tell him he's African-American?
Jasper: Listen man. He's too important to the movement. Tell him that he's black, he would probably kill himself. Just to be one less nigger around. His commitment is that deep.
Kent Wallace: I'm overwhelmed by the irony.

[Four guys are outside banging on the car. Jasper runs out to the car to save Clayton from trouble]
Skinhead #1: Hey, monkey! You lost, boy!
Skinhead #2: Run, boy, we don't like your kind around here!
Skinhead #1: You better get out of here before something bad happens.
Clayton Bigsby: That's right! That's right! Tell that nigger. That dirty nigger!
Jasper: Come on, Clayton, we got to go.
Clayton Bigsby: Jasper, there's nigger around here. That damn monkey was beatin' my hood
[Clayton gets back in the car]
Clayton Bigsby: [shouts] White power! Nigger!

The response in the media to this piece was focussing on whether or not one is allowed to fling around the troublesome N-word in such an irresponsible way. In his book Nigger Randall Kennedy asks himself the same question: Who is the “one” with permission? Who is allowed to make use of that word? Kennedy concludes that really no one should be excluded from the use of the N-word – neither blacks, nor whites (Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is mentioned in the “white context”). Whoever claims to own the exclusive right for using the N-word would automatically “[…] casts a protectionist pall over popular culture that would likely benefit certain minority entrepreneurs only at the net expense of society overall. Excellence in culture thrives, like excellence elsewhere, in a setting open to competition - and that includes competition concerning how best to dramatize the N-word” (Kennedy 104). Concerning the N-word and stereotypes in general Dave Chappelle is of the same opinion: “I was jokin’ around… I was starting to realize these sketches in the wrong hands are dangerous” (CS S02 E02). I think a word so heavily loaded with shameful history should not have a rightful owner. Just like any other stereotype the N-word should be part of public discourse and should not be used in just one way by one group. I think whites would have liked to see the N-word abolished with slavery, as it is a steady reminder of their history of oppression, but that, I think, would be too easy. I am convinced that there can be a healing aspect in the embarrassment of discussing certain racial topics before a (partially) white audience. The fear of, and anger about a black entrepreneur like Chappelle intruding into white cultural territory with the weapons of oppression cocked up and wielded against their former owners should initiate the reconsidering of the nature/culture dichotomy. R. Ellison said that by “changing the joke, they may slip the joke”. Chappelle follows Ellison’s advice by reversing the racist stereotypes in his “Pretty White Girl” piece:

Chappelle: That’s the thing about bein’ on TV you just never can say what you wanna say. If I said everything I thought, it would just freak America out. You wouldn’t wanna hear ‘ young black dude sayin’ half the things I’ve been thinkin’! The only way people would listen to the stuff I think, is if a pretty white girl sang my thoughts. And I actually happen to have a pretty white girl here. Pretty white girl come on out! She is in my contract… I have some things I need to get off my chest. (CS S01 E03)

The skit continues with Chappelle handing index cards, with his thoughts written on, to the “pretty white girl”. After having read them the girl starts singing in a classical voice: “Crack was invented and distributed to intentionally destroy the black community… Aids was too,” Dave Chappelle hands her another card and she continues, “gay sex is gross, sorry I just find it to bee gross – unless they are lesbians!” or “all Chinese people look alike… and so do white people… pretty much everyone who isn’t black looks alike to me.”

What’s most striking in this skit is that with Chappelle’s ordering the pretty white girl on stage (“Pretty white girl, come on out!”) we witness in the inversion of command that is somehow inherent to an intact nature/culture dichotomy. With white culture and civilization being superior to black nature and instinct behaviour the roles are clearly distributed: (“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” Authorized King James Version Gen. 1: 26). Chappelle changes the “God given” dominion that whites have derived from the bible and claims the commanding position for himself. His assuming this powerful position is legalized by white law (“she is in my contract!”). And all the sudden we see a black body legally controlling a white mind. And it is even more than just a reversing of roles it is also an inversion of the race dichotomy. The pretty white girl never says a word without having been told to do so beforehand. She is merely a medium, an instrument that simply echoes a black voice. The pretty white girl has turned into the body serving Chappelle’s black mind. Thus, the race dichotomy has been deconstructed into the exact opposite.

But Chappelle does not only aim at eradicating the root of all stereotypes, he also takes on the cuttings: The stereotypes and stereofears that are enrooted in the “race dichotomy”. Even though stereotypes provide oversimplified views on persons and situations, they are not that simple within themselves.

Stereotypes […] are packed palimpsests of meaning. They have been written over but not erased. They are like graffiti on subway walls, posters for rock concerts against racism, scrawled over by growing Janes declaring their lust for rising Jacks, these layers are obscured by spray painted signatures of gangs in rapid generations. Each successive layer aims to deface the previous, but in their haste they often fail, leaving the earlier strata to peep through. The old signatures pack considerable tension into popular culture’s palimpsests, reminding those who pass of their history. (Lhamon 81)

Dave uses stereotypes in multifaceted applications. He makes visible to his audience the layers of the palimpsests. Chappelle realized that what threatens white supremacy most is the loss of their self-identity. “[…] the stereotype can be utilized as an absolutely precise weapon against the dominant culture.” What the white mind has made of black people is exactly what compromises the white mind most deeply (Sartwell 187). Chappelle reminds white culture of their bodies, which they have deliberately (r)ejected. He displays the body per se – the violence, the sex, the play etc. In “The Pretty White Girl” skit he has the girl sing: “Oh, I want to stick my thumb in J. Lo’s butt!” or “I like lesbians… I like lesbians… I like lesbians!” and then he adds: “For real nigger, I like lesbians!” Being confronted with Chappelle’s openly expressed sexual desires whites are forced to acknowledge their bodies and the “lower” instincts that are still very much alive (I am pretty sure that many are secretly aroused by the sexual material that is displayed on Chappelle’s Show). Chappelle’s appearance as the black buck (the oversexed, violent black male) wakes up the white buck. Following this line of thought the awakening of the white buck that brings to knowledge the white suppressed body suggests the inversion of the “race dichotomy” argument: If whites are not only mind but body as well, then maybe blacks are not just body but also mind. The dualistic structure does no longer hold true and white culture has to acknowledge that the foundation upon which they have built their culture is a mere illusion and has never been sustainable.

A similar mode of resistance was also utilized by African-American artists who included nature, passion, emotion and instinct (anything generally associated with African-American “primitive” culture) in their works to arouse the ejected white body. The notion of the coherent unit of body and mind that primitivism displayed had the effect of provoking whites to emulate and desire that unity.

The irony of white-stereotyped views on black people is that it is an artificial way of perceiving difference. Black people were silenced and forced behind a veil and at the same time they were brought back into the white realm by the ascription of stereotypes. The truth remained hidden away. White lies about blacks were soaked up and taken at face value by white people. Whites started believing their own lies. Chappelle’s Show confronts the liar with his lies.

In his skit “Chappelle’s Educated Guess Line”, which is a spoof of Miss Cleo (a self-proclaimed psychic, who became known for her psychic pay-per-call service on TV), Chappelle imagines his own faux-Jamaican psychic hotline where he predicts the future based on racial stereotypes:

Chappelle: In the quest to get paid I have devised a new scheme Ladies and Gentleman. I’m gonna have my own phone line. Like Miss Cleo, you understand? But I’m gonna do mine real, see! Miss Cleo lies, she’s phony. Got a naggin’ suspicion that… that bitch ain’t Jamaican. Well, check mine out!

[Female voice introduces the phone line]

Dave Chappelle’s Educated Guess Line! Dave Chappelle is not a psychic! He is a racist who believes that racist stereotypes dictate our future.

[Dave Chappelle is sitting in a studio, tarot cards are projected on the blue screen behind him, he smokes. A girl has just called in]

Girl: My boyfriend says my butt is too big. Why would he say that? My old boyfriend liked it just fine.

Dave: Ok… have you gained weight?

Girl: No!

Dave: Ah, ok… so your current boyfriend is white.

Girl: Oh my Gosh, yes!

Dave: … Yes… and your old boyfriend black, ain’t he?

Girl: Oh my God, how did you know that?

Dave: Cause’ a brother can’t get enough of that ass! Hold up I’m seein’ somethin’. It’s you parents. They’re angry! Real angry! They kicked you out for dating a black dude!

Girl: Oh my God, there is no way you could have known that; unless you knew me.

Dave: … or if I dated four white girls myself.

The “Educated Guess Line” picks up all kinds of stereotypes about black people: Blacks date white girls with big buttocks, Blacks have an unappeasable sexual appetite (“a brother can’t get enough of that ass!”). But Chappelle’s guessing does not refrain from revealing stereotypes that blacks have about whites: Whites feel intimidated by obvious sexual signifiers (they like their buttocks smaller), they talk weird (“Oh my Gosh” etc.) and white people hate to see blacks mingling with their own kind. Some more stereotypes are displayed on “Dave Chappelle’s Educated Guess Line”:

[Next call]

Female voice: Collect call from a correctional facility. Will you accept the charges?

Dave: Yes, I will!

Female voice: Go ahead, Sir!

Dave: Alright, before you even say anything… You black ain’t you?

Man: Yo, this nigger is off the hook!

Dave: Wait a minute I see somethin’… you getting’ out of jail! You’ll walk off free as a bird! Oh, hold up… I’m seein’ some… it’s six weeks later; you goin’ right back into jail – for the same shit!

Dave Chappelle reveals so many different stereotypes that his audience should become suspicious. It is impossible for anybody to live up to every stereotype that Chappelle touches on in this sketch. “Persons who are constantly subjected to stereotypes […] ought to become suspicious not just of this or that generality, not just of this or that concept, but of concepts in general” (Sartwell 67). The exaggeration, that future depends on the stereotypes one embodies, should lead everyone to doubt the reliability of preconceptions of “others”. “Dave Chappelle’s Educated Guess Line illustrates the interracial misperception by discounting stereotypes as misshaped templates. The educated guessing of ‘racist’ Dave Chappelle confirms stereotypes with a self-awareness of others (“or if I dated four white girls myself.”) that is completely incompatible with the supposed content and values that shape stereotypes. In the end its Chappelle’s self-consciousness that is incompatible with the stereotype itself. By conflicting sharply with the stereotypes he exposes and deconstructs them as unreliable exaggerations (lies about blacks and whites) and by doing so he allows his audience to reconstruct something that is closer to reality from the remnants of that fabricated concoction.

Chappelle’s Show does not only wield its criticism at those outside the black community, he also flings immanent critique at those who supposedly profit from confirming black stereotypes. R. Kelly, P. Diddy, Samuel L. Jackson, O.J Simpson, Michael Jackson, Rick James (“I’m Rick James bitch”) are just some of his favourite targets who won questionable fame through the show. Dave Chappelle performing as R. Kelly is probably one of the most memorable critique. The “I wanna pee on you” alludes to R. Kelly’s sex scandal that was triggered by the appearance of a video tape in February 2002 that allegedly showed Kelly and a 14-year-old engaging in sex. The tape showed numerous sex acts, including the girl being urinated on. Apart from that case R. Kelly was indicted in Chicago for another 21 counts of having sex with minors, which were later reduced to soliciting a minor for child pornography, seven counts of videotaping the acts, and seven counts of producing child pornography (CNN). Chappelle performing as R. Kelly is an obvious attempt to distance himself and his community from the singer:

Dave Chapelle: You know I gotta tell you. I just bought one of the hottest albums in a long time. That Chocolate Factory… that R. Kelly! I mean say what you wanna say about his scandal, but his music is scandal-proof. But if you’ve been a real fan, you might have seen it commin’ like I did! Go ahead, role that video!

[Chappelle as R.Kelly]
Its the premium
40oz of malt liquor make me wanna tell ya somethin
[song starts]
I say, rollin' around,
sittin' on dubs
cat like eye, was high on shrubs,
Coolin' in my Escalade,
Man I'm paid, I got it made,
Take me to your special place,
Close your eyes show me your face,
I'm gonna piss on it.
(Chorus)
Haters gotta hate,
Lovers wanna love,
I don't even want,
None of the above,
I want to piss on you.
Yes I do, I'll piss on you,
I pee on you. […]
Only thing that makes my life complete,
Is when I turn your face into a toliet seat,
I want to pee on you,
Yes I do, pee on you,
I'll piss on you […]

(Chorus) (CS S01 E10)

Chappelle’s performing as R. Kelly and exposing him to the ridicule of being a sexual omnivore is Chappelle’s way of confirming Kelly to the stereotype that he has been exploiting to profit financially (“Coolin' in my Escalade / Man I'm paid, I got it made”).

With the appearance of scantily clad girls and R. Kelly was one of the first R&B performers to exploit the black buck stereotype, deliberately touching a sore spot of the community. This also reappears in the song lyrics. The word “Escalade” can mean two things. (1) A version of the Cadillac Escalade Pick Up Truck. (2) “Someone who is manufactured, fake, and or lies a lot” (Urbandictionary). The second reading provides the audience with Chappelle’s motivation to ridicule R. Kelly (who is just a surrogate for all those who exploit stereotypes their ancestors were subjected to): While R. Kelly is cooling off and profiting from the fake identity he chose, other members of his community are suffering from being ascribed to the visual imagery that Kelly has created so wilfully. With the song Chappelle makes an example of Kelly as a warning to all those who confirm stereotypes without ever divulging them as lies. With the “Piss on you song” Chappelle starts a public trial as an example for all those “who are seen as having bowed down before authority and thus are deserving of whatever they get, receive more than their fair share of ill-treatment” (Inglis 104). In his second season Chappelle reports to his audience about when he met Kelly soon after he had aired the infamous “Piss on you song”: “That Nigger is mad!... there ain’t no punch line to this… that nigger is mad. And he asked me ‘how are you goin’ makin’ a video about peein’ on somebody?’” Chappelle replies: “How you goin’ make a video about peein’ on somebody?” It’s the conformity to white society’s expectations of blackness that Chappelle challenges.

In a series of sketches called “When keeping it real goes wrong” Chappelle criticizes black street ethics and explores the attitude behind the catchphrase “keepin’ it real”. One of the skits involves a woman named Brenda. After a random wrong number hung up the phone on Brenda believes this rudeness to be a sign of her boyfriend cheating on her. Brenda uses call return, finds the woman’s house and destroys her car, which backfired for her when it turns out that the woman's car is really the property of the federal government. After a short trial Brenda is sentenced to six years in prison and is soundly beaten by three inmates who "keep it realer." The definition in the Urban dictionary for “keepin’ it real” explains what Chappelle criticizes with his sketch. “A black person's excuse for being ignorant or doing ignorant shit.” The “When keeping it real goes wrong” series plays with the black-on-black racist language, and judges blacks for calling serious violence “fate”, by assuming that violence is just part of black nature.

Chappelle also strategically employs the irony of Blaxploitation film. Blaxploitation is a film genre from the 1970s that targeted the urban African-American audience. The movies highlighted the race relation between black and white. The protagonists usually were black and devoted to beating up their white antagonists. Blaxploitation films were criticized for the use of black and white stereotypes. Ellison remarked that “… these films are not about Negroes at all, they are about what whites think and feel about Negros” (qtd. in Watkins, 1994: 27). And Strausbaugh adds that the films “… represent a Black reversal of the white mythos, White power, White law …” (259). With the Blaxploitational skit “Blackzilla” Chappelle takes on the genre and illustrates most vividly the opinions of Strausbaugh and Ellison. In the skit Chappelle destroys Tokyo, pees on citizens, beats up a Godzilla puppet and finally sexually abuses an active volcano. The skit is another “ferocious attack on the legacy of racial stereotyping” (Cobb 56). “Blackzilla” can be read as a parody of white imagination about black people. It ridicules the white picture of the violent black man and his overwhelming sexual capacity. It is the reversal of the white myths of exaggeration.

It is most remarkable that Chappelle’s satire manages to hold the multi-layered, reverse and double meanings of race-relations at bay. Chappelle’s resistance reintroduces alternatives to the stereotyped suspicious gaze of the races (I have focused on black and white relations but there are numerous examples of other race-relations as well). He exposes the “race dichotomy” as the origin of all stereotypes and his handling the stereotypes is “… like a martial art that turns the attacker’s energy against him and threatens him with his own violence” (Sartwell 184)

But Chappelle’s moving between the views of blacks looking at whites and vice versa is also a venture of considerable danger. The dilemma of consciously travelling both worlds (black and white) to collect material is foreseeable. Chappelle has to deal with the ambivalence of confirming stereotypes and the elimination of cultural differences. The “Black Gallagher” piece is a good example of this. The skit is a depiction of what happened when comedian Leo Gallagher gave his bit to his brother who, according to the sketch, sold the bit to an African-American, who dubs himself "Black Gallagher". The sketch concludes with Black Gallagher teasing his famous Sledge-O-Matic routine (smashing a watermelon with a large mallet). But, rather than smashing the Watermelon, Chappelle pulls a gun and shoots it. But the bullets go right through the watermelon and inadvertently hit audience members. “Black Gallagher” panics and declares „I’ve got warrants!". The watermelon as a metaphor for the stereotype about black people in general is destroyed by Chappelle’s resistance (visualized by the gun and bullets). But his resistance does not only eliminate the stereotype but also parts of the audience (again blacks and whites are affected) who thought to witness the execution of their very own preconceptions.

In order not to “loose” his diverse audience it is not enough to just shoot the watermelon, but it is also necessary to wield the weapons of resistance consciously – “double consciously” if one keeps the diverse audience in mind. Now, Chappelle is facing the problem of how to resist stereotypes without confirming them at the same time; how to protect his audience from going down with the stereotypes. In the next chapter I will look at how Chappelle does not only meet these problems but also how he avoids not getting lost between the two worlds he so light-heartedly moves between.

Chapter Five

Chuck Taylor, Dave Chappelle and the Double Consciousness

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

- 1.CORINTHIANS 13:12

“In those somber forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, - darkly as though through a veil.”

- W.E.B DU BOIS

Until now I have concentrated on how Dave Chappelle tactically prepares his moves to resistance. Now I want to focus on what I consider one of Chappelle’s most deft reversals of internalized white oppression: W.E.B Du Bois’ concept of the black double consciousness.

It is a peculiar situation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striving; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double into a better and truer self. […] He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. (Du Bois 168-169)

According to Du Bois, the area of tension for Blacks is enrooted in the contrariety of conforming and resisting to the large amount of black stereotypes. Though giving in and affirming a certain stereotype to meet white expectation leads to black schizophrenia - a doubled consciousness. What I am actually trying to pack into words is best described as a Catch 22 situation: The awareness of being something you are not, changes into the anxiety that you are being something you are not and you start questioning if what you are at the moment is really you or just the enforced you. Either way, when the inability for a black person to decide whether or not he or she is still authentic or artificial in behaviour and appearance becomes manifest, it’s already too late; “the appearance leaks into the “private” space of mentality” (Sartwell 72). The leaking of the forced appearance into the private space does not only cause the individuals consciousness to double, but endangers the whole ethnic group he or she assigns him- herself to. “Although an ethnic group is self-consciously ethnic, its self-consciousness often has its source in outsiders. The identity that others assign to us can be a powerful force in shaping our own self-concepts. […] Indeed, ‘outsiders’ conceptions of us may be a major influence leading to our own self-consciousness as an ethnic population” (Cornell, Hartmann, 1998: 20). But there is also a comforting aspect in what Cornell and Hartman have observed. Their perception of ethnicity is the same as Dave Chappelle’s; starting with the fact that ethnicity is a social construct and is therefore changeable and contingent (As I have pointed out in Chapter Two). This is where Chappelle hooks in with his comedy.

In his Pixie-skit Chappelle reflects upon the surveillance by which white oppression is internalized and leading to a double consciousness. Pixies appear on ethnic people's shoulders trying to convince them to engage in stereotypical behavior. In the case of Dave Chappelle the Pixie-devil (also played by Chappelle) appears in blackface and a classical minstrelsy outfit. The Pixie convinces Chappelle that he would meet a common stereotype if he only ordered chicken on a flight, but Chappelle dodges the trap by ordering fish instead (even though he desperately wants the chicken). But the minstrel rejoices when food arrives and he realizes it is catfish. What at first sight looks like a vivid illustration of the double consciousness and the problems inherent to that concept, is actually a solution to the problem and moreover a means of resistance.

By displaying that he is affected by the Pixie, Chappelle shows his way out of the Catch 22 position- he makes his split consciousness visible, he illustrates the struggle he is going through and by doing so he exposes the (minstrel) stereotype to the (white) public. Or, speaking in W.E.B Du Bois terms; Chappelle, by revealing the outcome of white oppression, “draws back the veil” behind which lies the invisibility of blacks in America. In his work Souls of Black Folk Du Bois states that blacks in America eke out an existence in oblivion, "after the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of a seventh son, born with a veil” (Du Bois 168) Saint Paul's use of the veil in Second Corinthians (“And not as Moses, which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished” [Authorized King James Version 2. Cor. 3:13]) is very similar to Du Bois’ veil metaphor. Both Saint Paul and Du Bois say that as long as one renders invisible behind the veil, their attempts to gain self-consciousness will eventually fail because they will always see the image of themselves mirrored back to them by others (this is obviously the same kind of struggle Ellison’s Invisible Man goes through). 

               But Chappelle takes the step forward into public and visibility. He shows that he is aware of the schizophrenic way he perceives himself, but is not subjected to it because he is aware of the situation that tries to bind him. By daring to undergo the type of self-questioning that situates Blacks in specific spaces, Dave Chappelle “resists a full-fledged institutional incorporation” (Sartwell 72) of the double consciousness. By “drawing back the veil” he does not only save himself from a split identity, but the drawing also prefaces a move of resistance. 

               Together with his show, Dave Chappelle is part of black American popular culture. This brings his culture to center stage, providing an opportunity for discussion.  Black culture is no longer a subject of erasure and silence. The tables have turned and now Chappelle’s Show leaks into the private space of whites and blacks. For whites to finally see what the oppressed feels like enables the chance to access and comprehend black culture as part of their own culture. “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto” (Strausbaugh 33). But before acknowledging a mulatto society, whites see themselves confronted with the unwrapped blackness they never really wanted to see, since for whites the sudden revelation of black culture is connected with feelings of guilt, fear and anger (Jensen). All these feelings, if they are thoroughly examined, will eventually lead all Whites to acknowledge the responsibility for: “(1) those racist acts that I have committed in my life, and (2) my failures to do all that I can to resist to white supremacy and contribute to changing a racist system” (Jensen 47). Chappelle’s “drawing back the veil” may be a motivation for some to reach this measurable outcome Jensen imagines. The Pixie skit, making visible the black struggle for unforced identities, causes the roles to, momentarily, invert. The question that has been on the black mind for decades now turns itself against its guilty inquirer and the white realm. “No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide” (Baldwin 725). And caused by the feeling of guilt W.E.B. Du Bois’ famous question to blacks “How does it feel to be a problem?” finds a different, a white, addressee. 

The fact that Du Bois didn't ask this question out of self-pity, anger, or remorse, only intensifies white guilt. Through Dave Chappelle the audience becomes aware of the dilemma of blackness and is now torn between guilt and shame, envy and the extrusion of the past. “…over the last several decades … Americans have become chronically embarrassed about their past. Any material from historical record that is now determined to be offensive to any minority group is… made ‘unhistory’” (Strausbaugh 30). Whereas, during the Harlem Renaissance the “New Negro” rose to self-esteem, Chappelle’s creation of the “New White” is forced into the healthy process of doubting and questioning his old self.

Not being able to escape Chappelle’s resistance, Whites, now having to evaluate every aspect of their social life and culture, turn into their own oppressors. Nothing exemplifies this better than the white guy Phil in the pixie sketch. Phil attempts to repel his racial pixies (Dave Chappelle in Whiteface) at a dance club. The pixie pops up while Phil meets three of his black friends for drinks. The intimidated white pixie gives him advice on the situation; “Oh, my God black people you better hit them with their own vernacular. I heard that makes them feel more comfortable. Tell them it’s your birthday and then say you don’t give a fuck that it’s your birthday… or you go: ’Give you a hug an’ I give you some rubb!’ Heard that on the radio on the way up here!”

Later, one of the friends points out a woman at the bar with large buttocks. The white pixie scoffs at the woman’s "superfluous" backside, suggesting he should find a girl with a "pancake butt" instead. “White men like a good old-fashioned pancake butt, now that’s what mommy used to make. Nice and flat!” The woman ends up asking the white man to dance, which the pixie says not to do, as it's a trap, since he can't possibly make those moves. When the man dances well with her, the pixie says with disgust, "Damn this BET” (Black Entertainment Television), before suggesting some good old-fashioned rock & roll music and singing Duran Duran's The Reflex.

The dialogue between the white guy and his three black friends makes clear that whites, now that they know that they are a considerable problem themselves, are not able to communicate with blacks. The awareness of being partly responsible for the others dilemmas and miseries leads to a communicative disaster: They don’t talk at all! Phil, the white guy, in his inability to deal with the blackness of his friends remains literally speechless. While blacks have had years to work off their split identity, whites are naturally swamped with the different voices in their heads.

As Phil’s “white” consciousness keeps revealing his racist attitude, we witness that he obviously feels uncomfortable with what his mind says. Here the nature of the two voices within the double consciousness becomes obvious. One is the denying voice, the voice that tells Phil that he is far from being a racist, but the other one (the pixie) affirms all the racist attitudes that Phil was made to believe had died with his ancestors and the abolishment of slavery. This is the kind of “white double consciousness” that develops when whites realize that all this time they have been the root of the “black problem”.

The moment white consciousness splits is very effectively shown by Chappelle’s appearance in whiteface, that here symbolizes the “twoness” of white Phil. Much like the black double consciousness asks itself whether or not he or she is acting in accordance of white expectation, the white double consciousness asks itself: Is my behavior degrading? Racist? What am I to say? What can I do to prove to my opposite person that I have never succumbed to any racist view? What can I do to prove that I don’t feel superior? But by asking myself these questions I am already convicted by my own racism. I am stuck in a white Catch 22 that is very similar to its black counterpart. Here again a solution could be to drag all racism out of its concealment and make it visible. “To make oneself visible in white [or black] social space is to liberate oneself in a certain way from the oppression that drops a veil over one’s culture” (Sartwell 152). By making my own racism visible I can finally start to hate it.

Actually, I think this kind of hating ourselves and our privilege is the first step toward being able to truly love. Poet Nikki Giovanni made this point to writer James Baldwin, about the relationship of black and white:

Giovanni: I think one of the nicest things we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, Hey, I don’t like white people.

Baldwin: It’s a great liberation.

Giovanni: It was the beginning, of course, of being able to like them.

The same holds for the relationship of white to ourselves. When we acknowledge that we don’t – or shouldn’t – like some aspects of ourselves, it can be a liberation that ends with a more authentic loving of ourselves and others. (Jensen xviii)

The Pixie skit proves that what W.E.B Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk describes as a dilemma in the hands of Dave Chappelle turns into a mode of resistance. The double consciousness becomes a source of strength. Being “A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striving; two warring ideals in one dark body” also means that black people are able to look at a situation with two different sets of eyes – white eyes and black eyes. The black person suffering from a double consciousness is able to observe from two, not only different, but completely opposite perspectives. “It is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is” (Baldwin 167). This also holds true for the Pixie skit.

This time the white pixie appears in a restroom where a white man has to use a urinal between two black men. The white man can’t help it but looks down at his neighbour’s penises. A “BOING” sound and the expression on the guys face indicate that the black penises are probably a lot bigger than his. The pixie orders the shocked white guy to look straight ahead: “You look straight ahead, Sir! Don’t let that scare you! That is the bane of our existence! THE BLACK PENIS! And remember, no matter how big his dick is, at least you run the goddamn world!” One of the black men faces the pixie directly. “Can you see me?” the Pixie asks. The Black man reveals “Yes I can see you!” The pixie tells him, "this is an A and B conversation, so why don't you C your way out of it? [to the white guy the Pixie confidentially whispers] “Saw that on one of their Negro shows: ‘Martin’" The black man angrily replies, "Why don’t you see deez nuts!" and urinates on him.

Blacks know white people. They know about their oppressor and his tactics to force them into silence and concealment. Having been the target of white oppression has not only evoked the “twoness” in the minds of black people, but has also provided them with a deep knowledge about the oppressor himself and in the hands of the oppressed, this knowledge turns into a weapon of resistance. The black man in the “urinal” clip is aware of the white prejudices and fears. By peeing on the pixie he does not only express his anger at the white mind, but also relieves it. The pixies views are exposed as lies and “washed” away by the black man. I don’t want to bastardize the clip completely, but I think it is possible to interpret the erasure of the pixie (who after having been peed on disappears) as a preparing step to absolution for the white mind, which had been subdued to a whole bunch of homemade lies about the world and its culture. About the power of this knowledge Sartwell writes:

The knowledge-claim, and the effort to gather knowledge, are certainly instruments of power. But white power is or becomes invisible to itself. Power proceeds by a falsification of its object, and finally by a falsification of itself; the self-knowledge of those who wield power in the age of comprehension is always compromised, always imploding; power is always concealing itself to itself. As it does this, it renders itself perfectly visible, so that to those who stand outside it, and especially to its victims, who conceal themselves in its interstices, it becomes more and more available as an object of knowledge. (85)

So, it was the power of knowledge that forced the white pixie into visibility, to become easy prey for the black mans resistance. Knowledge in general is the key to Chappelle’s resistance. He knows about his cultural heritage and the oppression his culture has been through. This knowledge provides him with a huge weaponry to resist whites’ unjust supremacy. One of these weapons is, as I have pointed out, the double consciousness. For Whites, to acknowledge Blacks as individuals (with a consciousness) who have also contributed to American culture, is to comprehend a purely white culture as a myth “strongly shaped by white hegemony” (Strausbaugh 31).

A deep insight into the development of the double consciousness is also presented in Ralph Ellison’s Kafkaesque novel Invisible Man. The protagonist, striving to find his identity is haunted by the tension between masking and open expression, minstrelsy and Harlem Renaissance. In the end of the novel, the Invisible Man decides to leave his shelter and step into society. Disregarding every advice (black and white) he abandons his double consciousness and by stepping into society he becomes visible.

Dave Chappelle is much like the Invisible man. He also is tired of being passive, and openly disdains those who are. In a skit about himself being a fighter he shows where passivity is leading.

Dave Chappelle is smoking on stage. “Yes, Ladies and Gentleman I’m smokin’ on Television. I’m smokin’ indoors! You know why? Because I didn’t vote for Bloomberg. I’m fightin’! Bloomberg has messed everything up. Cigarettes are up to 7 dollars a pack – that’s Crack prices! People are gonna be suckin’ dicks for cigarettes soon! Ridiculous! I can’t stand it anymore… I’m fightin’. It’s in my blood. I have no choice but to fight. I’m a genetic dissenter. It’s in my genes. I’ll show you a tape of my history:

New York 2003: Dave Chappelle is smoking outside, obviously freezing. “Man, Bloomberg is fuckin’ up!”

Chicago 1945: D. C. is reading a newspaper. Headline reads: Truman drops the bomb! “Man, Truman is fuckin’ up!”

South California 1863: D.C. in front of a slave hut carving on a piece of wood. “Man, Lincoln is fuckin’ up. White people are fuckin’ up!”, he spots something, “shhhhhh… they’re commin’!”

Africa 1695: D.C. is a tribesman standing on the shore with retinue. “Man, the Chief is fuckin’ up!” He looks over the sea and spots a ship, “Hey, some white people let’s see what they want!” – Two weeks later D.C. finds himself chained under the deck of a slaveship, “Man, I’m fucked up!” (CS S02 E03)

With this skit Dave Chappelle shows that the subtle fight of Invisible Man’s grandfather, “I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction. Let them swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (Ellison 14), won’t lead him nor anybody else to victory. The opposite is the case. Staying behind the veil is essentially enslavement.

Among a large variety of different misshapen identities in Ralph Ellison’s novel, the Invisible Man sticks out. He is the only one, who, after a long struggle through the most surreal situations, is able to finally adapt to the diverse circumstances. He realizes that black people will always be alienated from society unless they lift the veil and shift into the mainstream in order to find a somewhat secure place to immanently change the system (Foster, Harris 342).

Both, Invisible Man but even more Dave Chappelle, chose to step forward and develop a sense of humor instead of dying in concealment. The leaving of his shelter is Invisible Man’s attempt to try something new on his quest for identity.

Dave Chappelle is, in many ways, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Although he’s been a stand-up comedian for quite some years, with the concept of Chappelle’s Show he has practically left his shelter to show that the double consciousness doesn’t inevitably have to be an everlasting burden, but can serve as a focus mirroring and demasking a somewhat self-satisfied society. Dave Chappelle has shifted into society - without extraditing his cultural heritage - to entertain, criticize and disgrace from an immanent point of view.

Chapter Six

Language and Profanity

… No, I can't stop yellin’ at you, 'cause that's how I talk! Haven't you seen my movies? "Juice" That was a good one! "Deep Blue Sea" They ate me! A MOTHERFUCKIN’ SHARK ATE ME! Drink up, bitch!

- DAVE CHAPPELLE as SAMUEL L. JACKSON

Language has been a mode of resistance throughout the history of African-America: a medium of artistic creation, and a mode of cultural preservation. Chappelle’s Show tells us a lot of things about the problematic relation of Blacks to white language. “White people taught African slaves how to speak English; then Africans helped teach everyone how to speak American” (Strausbaugh 290).

Language to Whites is more than just a means of communication. It was and still is the one pillar that supports the “race dichotomy”. Nothing else determines our social and individual identity as our use of language, “It is also a way to signal how you identify yourself” (Strausbaugh 302). The proper use of language is an important strategy to exercise authority. From a different point of view I want to look at the nature/culture dichotomy again. When thinking about language it becomes obvious that while nature does not need to be explained, as it can be consumed transcendentally, culture has to be taught, transmitted and passed on by language. So, the abstract term of culture becomes conceivable by the power of word. Thus, for Whites keeping the language, and the knowledge connected to it, to themselves was the easiest way to shield their culture against unwanted intruders; which is why Whites only half-heartedly gave away their language to African-Americans.

So Chappelle hijacks the white language and with it the key to white culture and the medium through which culture is transferred into reality. Assuming power over white English is assuming a creational, divine power; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (Authorized King James Version John 1: 1-3).

With the key to culture in his hands he is free to design his own culture, a culture that resists white restriction. Before the face of its former owner, Chappelle bends, stretches, abuses and enhances a language that was used to signify white superiority. What Chappelle can do to or with language can be explored by listening to what he says after the first sketch of the series “A moment in the life of Lil John” was aired. Chappelle expresses his irritation about the lyrics in one of the Lil John’s songs he has heard on the radio.

“Skeet, skeet, skeet, skeet, skeet… you can’t say that aloud on the radio! Now, you can’t say “skeet” on the radio. Well, what the fuck? If they can say “skeet” on the radio, then I say it on my show. Do you know why white people don’t ban “skeet” from the radio? Because they don’t know what it means yet. When they figure it out; they’ll be like: ‘My God, what have we done?’” (S2 E6)

this is a perfect example how blacks cipher the white language and throw it back at them (“They don’t know what it means yet!”). It’s a game played at the cost of whites. By expanding the language that once passed on culture changes, it is alienated from its owner. The words that once obeyed and executed white commands now have found a different master. And moreover, from Chappelle’s gesturing (he is doing some awkward movements with the hands in his crotch) the spectator can almost be certain that the word “skeet” has a sexual connotation. The Urban dictionary offers the following definitions (among many others) for the word “skeet”:

"Skeet" is actually a form of birth control practiced by the African-American tribes of North America near the beginning of the 21st Century. Visionaries of the time (such as Lil Jon and Nelly) recognized the inevitable and ever-present danger of overpopulation in their land and decided to take action. They discovered an ancient form of birth control used by their ancestors that involved "pulling out and shooting" (much like skeet shooting) during sexual intercourse, as to not impregnate the female, or "biatch". The visionaries spread the word the only way they knew how: rap music. People would listen to the songs of the visionaries during ritual smoking ceremonies and chant "skeet, skeet, skeet!"

Dave Chappelle does not stop at estranging whites from their own language he also reintroduces the body to the language. And by doing so he reintroduces the body to the white mind that had so thoroughly ejected it decades ago. What seems like a game of mockery is a serious form of resistance.

Chappelle’s treating the “skeet-subject” with jocularity should not be mistaken for his own resistance lacking seriousness. “A life without play is a disaster; thus, play is serious” (Sartwell 149). In the second season of his show, Chappelle installed play in the form of music acts at the end of each episode. The music acts are what is widely considered black music acts, ranging from Rap and Hip Hop to Soul and R&B. My remarks about the role of music will be of a rather general quality as the field of Black Music is simply too wide and deep to discuss it thoroughly in this context.

Both Rap and Dave Chappelle use profanity as a means to playfully reintroduce the body to the mind. Standard English as an indicator of “high culture” is most often a subject to self-imposed censorship when used by the “purified” white mind.[1] Profanity in this sense can also be regarded as telling dirty (inside) jokes. Raps, as well as Chappelle’s ribald humor is deriving its pleasure from bringing back to mind that which white culture has sought to hide from sight; “namely the ‘material bodily stratum’, those ‘organic’ aspects of human life that involve fucking, pissing, shitting, puking, menstruating and all the other ways in which the body can act in what [white] high cultural norms define as ‘disgusting’ fashions” (Inglis 106). Apart from the ‘material bodily stratum” profanity consists also of a verbal violence, that can already threaten its addressee by mere loudness. In Chappelle’s “Samuel Jackson Beer” commercial, profanity is taken to the extreme. The skit features Chappelle as a very profane and extremely loud Samuel L. Jackson advertising his new beer brand in a bar to a group of white businessmen. The skit consists of Jackson/Chappelle yelling famous Samuel L. Jackson catchphrases, like: "IT'LL GET YOU DRUNK!!", "YOU'LL BE FUCKING FAT GIRLS IN NO TIME! YOU MIGHT EVEN FIGHT A NIGGAR OR TWO! MM-MMM BITCH!!", "GOOD MUTHA FUCKING CHOICE, MUTHA FUCKA! and "HOW'S IT TASTE MOTHER FUCKA?!", Jackson/Chappelle ends the skit with "SAMUEL JACKSON! IT'S MY BEER! YES THEY DESERVE TO DIE, AND I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!"

The skit - a parody of the Samuel Adams beer commercials – confronts its (white) audience with the bawdy, anti-establishment humor I have mentioned in the introduction: A “low cultural invasion of bourgeois proprieties…. [That] signifies unruliness and disorder, a ‘profane’ interruption of the staid pieties of middle-class life” (Inglis 107). The skit itself – as many others I have described – isn’t just about profanity. Dave Chappelle as an inverted depiction of the famous patriot Samuel Adams suggests a profane body within the ‘purest’ white minds; the black stereotype of the violent beast becomes part of Samuel Adams: One of the founding fathers of the United States, a philosopher, a key architect of American culture is exposed as an unfinished body, a distorted image shaped by American historiography. About the body that is lying behind the kind of humor Chappelle deploys Bakhtin says:

…the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principal of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body…. (Bakhtin: 26)

Samuel L. Jackson is the grotesque body that, in the white mind has been engraved as being beyond any respectability. In most of his films Jackson reminds his audience of the typical Blaxploitation protagonists (in the “Shaft” sequel from 2000 he actually played Ernest Tydiman’s hero of the same name, the archetype of the Blaxploitation genre). In his movies Jackson beats up and kills people, (even though his favourite are white he doesn’t hesitate to give black people their fair share of ‘ass whupping’), he uses profanity and embodies the (sexual) masculinity usually ascribed to the black buck. By incorporating Jackson into Adams, Chappelle unifies the assumed anticlimaxes of black and white. The result is a creature that looks so pathetic, that once again the audience has to admit that stereotypes are hardly a template to provide sufficient orientation to social, political and cultural reality.

The importance of language for black cultural productions manifests in black music especially. I have pointed out elsewhere that music is an important part of African-American discourse. Therefore, I would like to consider Rap and Hip Hop artists as intellectuals contributing to that discourse. The appearances of some of the leading black “Rap intellectuals” (Kanye West, Talib Kweli, De La Soul, The WU Tang Clan, Mos Def etc.) legitimize the messages that Dave Chappelle conveys in his show and vice versa.

Towards language and stereotype, Rap music employs the same potentially subversive attitudes, which Dave Chappelle uses. Rap starts its resistance by its musical “shape”. For whites the lack of melody makes Rap a recalcitrant object, that is not as easy to access, as for example Pop music. Unlike Dave Chappelle, Rap music refrains from disguising or hiding behind soothing sounds. Whereas most white music prefers to establish itself as an alternative to the harsh reality, Rap music contradicts white utopian sounds with its facing factual truths (e.g. Mos Def’s Katrina Clap – a song about New Orleans after the hurricane). “In fact, the first criticism of rap by those who hate it (mostly white people, in my experience) is that it isn’t music at all, because it is not sufficiently melodic” (Sartwell 160). Thus, the mere sound of rap makes black resistance audible to white oppression.

Furthermore, Rap is also a form of reconquering black musical tradition. With its sampling and collaging “the entire history of recorded sound is available to be sampled” (Sartwell 161). What Whites once took from Blacks (the music that is nowadays ascribed to Elvis, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles) can now, through sampling, be reincorporated into the music of its makers.

Rap music has a very special affinity to language, which would probably be best described as a love-hate relationship. Rappers have to use language to enter into the public space, but I can never really tell if they feel really comfortable with it. Maybe, that is the reason for Blacks to de- and reconstruct the language until it becomes their own.

It is important to realize that Black English isn’t just an incompletely learned or lazy corruption of Standard English, either, as many Whites suppose. The apparent “mistakes” that speakers of Black English make aren’t haphazard errors. A linguist J. L. Dillard pointed out in the landmark Black English of 1972, Black English follows rules of grammar and syntax that are every bit as complex and subtle as those of Standard English. […] which is why when Whites try to mock and mimic Black speech, it often doesn’t sound quite right. They miss the logic and the poetry, and just sound coarse and buffoonish.” (Strausbaugh 294)

On the other hand Black English in general and in Rap particularly seems to de- and reconstruct Standard English in ways of most devoted playfulness. Black English constitutes itself as an English within English to show what can be done if one only dares to do it. Black English can at times appear as a secret language: I have already shown that in the “skeet-example”, but it becomes obvious in Rap lyrics as well. For example In Mos Def’s song “Close Edge”, which he performed on Chappelle’s Show (S02 E05)

But when I'm lettin' off around don't get in the cross
Have ya preacher man speakin' low gettin' his cross
Tell 'em wild cowboy not to get off they horse
Before they find out the talion is strictly enforced
It's a real bad way to get ya name in the Source
Testin' the limits of a dangerous force
Ya ended up dumb famous and gone
Your people shoutin' out ya name in they song
Pourin' liquor on the day you was born
Find paint to put ya face on the wall
C'mon fall back, there's no need for all that
It's all good, we all here, goin' all out (all out)
All day, listen when this song say

This excerpt should illustrate how Rap lyrics exclude whites from immediately grasping black messages (Which for me as a non-native speaker of the English language is a lot harder – maybe even impossible - anyway). Rap music shows its white listeners that they should be alerted, since they are not entering common ground but new soil. “Rap is designed to be partially incomprehensible to crackers like me. It makes me feel my exclusion, and hence intensifies my discomfort” (Sartwell 188). Thus, Rap is also a mocking of whites by turning their language into an inside joke.

Conclusion

“We are afraid to laugh at ourselves and for anyone to laugh at us. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, Fuck ‘em if they can’t tell a joke. Fuck ‘em if you can’t Fuck ‘em”

- PAUL BEATTY

Chappelle’s Show is an attempt to assume authority over black discourse, by providing a general structure of bittersweet and deceptive jocularity. Chappelle’s Show is a product of African-American (popular) culture that is designed to grant a diverse audience access to some parts of the black mind, the black body, the black soul. But the show is not about learning about “others”; by watching the show and listening to Chappelle’s voice the audience learns about itself, its prejudices, its racism and its deceitfulness. Chappelle presents the problems of America’s “multicultural, multiethnic patchwork” society in his “Plain” piece.

Two Arabian men argue heatedly aboard an airplane. Though they speak another language with suspicious annunciation, from subtitles the audience learns that they are talking about how they thought Justin Timberlake should have been the "American Idol". Behind them sit two black men, shaking their heads angrily. The audience hears them thinking, "Of all the flights to be on I gotta ride with them terrorist sons of bitches.” and "I got my eye on you, Al Queda!" Just behind the black men sits a white man with his daughter. He wonders how two Negroes got seats in first class, he deduces they must be rappers, and, clenching his hand protectively around his daughters arm, he thinks, “I better keep an eye on Amy!” Behind the white man sit two Native Americans. One of them thinks to himself, “White Guys! And I need to go to the toilet! As soon as I get up there’ll be one of them commin’ to take my seat and then claim it manifest destiny!” Behind the Native Americans sit two Buffalo. One of them says to the other, "At least the Indians got Casinos. Corn eating bastards!" And behind the Buffalo sit Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan. Chappelle is fast asleep in his seat, with a newspaper (“The Daily Truth”) tucked under his arm. The Headline reads "AMERICA UNITED". Dave scratches his balls. (S01 E03)

Concerning Dave Chappelle’s treating race issues humorously “makes it more comfortable to talk about you and me and the ways we perceive each other”. I have given several definitions for the term “stereotypes” and I have pointed out some of Chappelle’s strategies to use them as weapons of resistance. And I have learned about the painful truths that are part of the understanding of that resistance. Chappelle’s Show offers its audience to distrust itself and I am convinced that it would be most curative for everybody to grasp at the opportunity to face ourselves without any veils that seal us from ourselves. But as the “Plain” piece indicates, Chappelle does not only push his audience into processes of self-laceration, but he also offers reconciliation. The salving certainty that prejudiced and stereotyped views are not an exclusively white misconduct but a universal problem that affects all human beings, reconciles the audience with itself.

The “Plain” sketch highlights another aspect: Stereotypes should not be light-headedly condemned as racist templates. Sociologist David Inglis stresses, “that sociology is generally in the business of stereotyping people. For the most part this is a very necessary and useful exercise – we need to draw generalizations about people so we can see general trends” (18). By watching the different ethnicities on the plain looking at each other with nagging suspicions the spectator comes to realize that (his) hasty generalizations need to be reconsidered. The stereotype has to be exposed as what it is – the first step in the process of approaching “otherness”. Therefore Inglis warns to persist in ‘stereoviews’, “it is absolutely crucial to remember… that each person’s life is both expressive of wider social and cultural forces and specific and unique to them” (19). In other words, once one recognizes a stereotype, the stereotype can become a door through which we can enter into deeper comprehension of diversity.

Chappelle’s “Racial Draft” is another skit that bridges the gaps between the different ethnicities. The piece allows various ethnic groups (Jews, Chinese, African-Americans, Whites) to trade for multiracial celebrities that they have always wished to adopt. The black delegation drafts Tiger Woods – due to his mother being an Asian woman, Woods was not ‘one hundred percent black’ before the draft. Tiger Woods (Chappelle) ends his moving acceptance speech yelling, “So long fried rice, hello fried chicken. I love you Dad!” From the announcer’s booth Chappelle adds, “I've just received word that Tiger has lost all his endorsements. Nike, Wheaties, Amex, Tag Heuer, the whole shebang-a-bang. Well, tough break, nigga. There's always FUBU”. The draft continues and while the Asians walk off with the Wu-Tang Clan, white people pick Collin Powell.

Essayist William Jelani Cobb talks about the “Racial Draft” as a piece of comedy that “did more to explain the state of American culture than the last dozen academic conferences on ‘hybridity’ and ‘cultural miscegenation’.” I agree with Cobb entirely, but there is another aspect to this skit. The audience is not simply informed about the state of American culture, but also faces a piece of popular culture that ingenuously associates with a large variety of stereotypes. According to Strausbaugh, popular culture is an alternative to present reality (174). Chappelle’s Show and the “Racial Draft” is a parallel universe, a utopia where there are no rules on how to react - politically correct - towards “otherness”. Chappelle’s Show blurs the borders of ethnicity and washes away ethnic boundaries.

Just as Dada was an artistic reaction to the devastation caused by WWI, Chappelle’s Show is a reaction to the absurdity of racism. Where else could Jews adopt Lenny Kravitz as one of their own or Blacks embrace Eminem to their culture? As I have pointed out in the beginning, Chappelle employs a concept of ethnicity that is very close to the constructionalists view on ethnic identities as abstract notions shaped entirely through assignments (from in- and outside) and comprehension. In short, ethnic identities are built by circumstances altogether. The “Racial Draft” plays with that view, when all picks readily accept their newly assigned identities without hesitation. Moved to tears after having been picked by the Blacks, Tiger Woods promulgates, “I am so glad to finally have a home!” The circumstances (the draft, the ascription, the approval for the drafting process) outshine Lenny Kravitz’s black roots, Collin Powell’s blackness and Eminem’s whiteness. The classical concept of ethnicity (blood ties and ancestry) is levered.

In the last chapters I have tried to make visible some of the beating Chappelle’s audience has to endure. I want to finish this thesis by explaining one of Chappelle’s perennial invitations to reconciliation. In the second chapter I have already analyzed a skit called “White people dancing”. I now want to analyze the same sketch under a different aspect. When Dave Chappelle, along with John Mayer, explores the effects of different instruments on different races, well behaved people freak out. When Mayer plays the guitar, white people start dancing on tables, undressing and “moshing”. When Questlove (drummer for The Roots) plays the drums in a black barbershop all the black people respond immediately. Some start rapping, others move their bodies to the rhythm. The Latinos again cannot resist the urge to dance when hearing Congas and electric Piano with Spanish gibberish over it. Chappelle concludes, “white people can dance, if you play what they like: Electric Guitar. So the next time someone says that someone from another race can’t dance… fuck ‘em!” The skit ends with a message reading, “People on earth / no matter what your instrument / keep dancing”

I think it is obvious how much Chappelle sympathizes with all “people on earth” and not just with some “races”. In his introduction to the “White people dancin’” he says

Lots of things have happened in the last few weeks. ‘ got criticized for the racially charged sketches. It happens. But I think I am being misunderstood. And I want to just take a moment and explain myself. I am not advocating any form of racial hatred. I’m just makin’ fun of everyones cult.

Chappelle here describes his key to reconciliation. Chappelle’s working benign subtleties into his racy comedy allows him to cross the lines of every culture. Dave Chappelle is not only concerned about his own people, he is concerned with his society and therefore revises a variety of prejudices no matter what ethnicity they are connected to. Chappelle’s Show never drives wedges between ethnicities without removing them in the end. Following Dave Chappelle we enter a “racial common ground” through laughter; a place from where individuals are released to move toward social reconciliation. No doubt it might be painful for some people, may they be black or white, to watch his show. But despite the shows present controversy it is a joyous embracing of all ethnicity, even of life in general. According to Christopher John Farley from the Time magazine ethnic divisions in social, political and cultural life are as rampant as ever and “are becoming more complex, harder to discuss. He [Dave Chappelle] takes all those hang-ups about race and lifts them up, spins them around, puts them in your face. Deal with it. Laugh at it. But don’t ignore it” (Time Magazine). Chappelle’s resistance – the consideration of historical resistance (namely Minstrelsy, Harlem Renaissance and Blaxploitation) in the context of African-American popular culture – is not just interested in what divides people, but also in what reconciles them. Since cultural commentator Michael Eric Dyson points directly at the core of Chappelle’s Show, I want him to have the last word in the thesis and on the subject.

[Chappelle] illumines the idiocy, the sheer lunacy, of racial bigotry, while also fearlessly pointing the finger at black folks’ loopy justifications of questionable black behaviour. He’s great at taking particular events, episodes and escapades and using them to show America the unvarnished truth about itself. (qtd. in Dunn)

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[1] In the last few years white censorship was associated with Tipper Gore, co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC). “She is protecting us from those who say the wrong words and thus compromise our culture […]. White culture, in the person of Tipper Gore, can consume and enjoy black cultural production as long as it stays in its place” (Sartwell 187).