Dave Chappelle sits at a piano, smoking cigarettes and staring into space. He is contemplative, seemingly trapped in his own world and saying nothing for stretches of time. But when this scene actually took place last winter, Chappelle was not in his own world: He was onstage at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, with more than a hundred people staring back at him.
In recent years, the comedian has become known for gigs of wildly varying quality. He often tells crowds he has no new material due to fear of winding up on YouTube, then shuts down when audiences scream out for old jokes. His smoking-in-awkward-silence routine has played out in San Francisco, Miami, Austin, and just three nights ago in Hartford, when he sat quietly on a stool for 25 minutes, performing no new material.
Chappelle makes his first scheduled area appearance in years Friday at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden, NJ, for the Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival. (The fest hits the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ, the next night.) Given his recent history, it’s impossible to predict whether fans will see a brilliant comic — or a man staring into space.
Chappelle secured his place as comedy’s most boundary-smashing voice in 2003, with his television series “Chappelle’s Show.” But in 2005 — after signing a Comedy Central deal reportedly worth $50 million — the comic abruptly jetted off to Africa to clear his head.
He never returned to “Chappelle’s Show.” Rather, the comedian holed up in his tiny hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio.
But he didn’t abandon the stage. Chappelle began making unannounced appearances at comedy clubs just a few months after the Comedy Central debacle. Many of the gigs have gone off the rails, seemingly due to Chappelle’s passive attitude toward hecklers.
“I’ve never seen Dave Chappelle tell an audience to shut up. Sometimes, that’s what you gotta tell ’em,” says comedian Charlie Murphy, who was a regular on “Chappelle’s Show.” “[But] once you tell somebody to shut up, what if they wanna fight? That’s gotta be part of your personality. I don’t think Dave Chappelle is gonna start scrapping onstage.”
A June 2013 show in Knoxville, Tenn., was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers, until Chappelle reportedly flipped the crowd a middle finger as he walked offstage. The same month, according to Web site Mass Appeal, Chappelle lost control of a show in Austin when, 10 minutes in, an audience member was caught recording on his phone. Security tried to kick him out, but Chappelle let him stay. The comic told the crowd, “He won’t miss anything; I’ve only got four minutes of material,” which, the site noted, “wasn’t far from the truth.”
At a July 2011 Miami event, Chappelle told one joke; put off by people recording, he then spent 45 minutes conversing awkwardly with individual crowd members.
Roland Martin, then a CNN reporter, was at the show, and tweeted how Chappelle checked his text messages four times while onstage — and how one woman yelled, “Can you tell a joke so we can enjoy ourselves?”
Comedian William Stephenson, who has known Chappelle for decades, believes the aimlessness might have deeper purpose.
“A lot of guys who reach that level, if they’re not onstage for awhile, they need love,” he says. “It felt like Dave [wanted to be] where people could applaud him.”
Whatever the reason, perhaps the comedian was brainstorming a new set amid the silence. A June show in Richmond, Va., featured 90-plus minutes of strong material.
“He did a bit about booking his own flight,” says Bonnie Lane, an attorney who caught the show. “The only seat was in coach, and he said it was like ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ ”
She describes Chappelle acting as if dragging a cross down the aisle of a plane.
The comic sold more than 14,000 tickets for 10 shows at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal in July, a record for the 31-year-old event. Adam Newman, a comedian who recently appeared on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” attended one of those shows.
“I’ve seen Seinfeld, I’ve seen Cosby, I’ve seen Louis C.K. But Chappelle was on another level,” says Newman. “When you see him do a bit, you can actually visualize it as a ‘Chappelle’s Show’ sketch.”
Whichever Chappelle shows up this week, it seems that his travails are rarely far from his mind. Lane recalls a bit Chappelle did in Virginia, about speaking at a high school. After fumbling for advice to give the students, he finally said, “You know what, kids? I guess what I’m trying to say is, ‘Don’t quit your show.’ ”