Chappelle Doing Well?

I've heard a whole lot of unpleasant rumors this week about Dave Chappelle. As any comedy fan surely knows by now, last week Comedy Central put his weekly sketch comedy show, "Chappelle's Show" on indefinite hiatus. The official line seemed to be that Chappelle was MIA in South Africa. I had heard he was in a mental hospital, several people were theorizing that he had developed a rather unmanageable drug problem. One person assured me that the guy had suffered a total mental breakdown.

As much as I like and respect Chappelle, it wasn't that hard to believe the worst. The really brilliant stand-up comedians tend to be the most messed up kind of people. One need look only at the dearly departed Mitchell Hedberg to see recent evidence of the toll celebrity and success can take on the fragile psyche of the hard-working professional comic. Basically, these are kind of neurotic, introspective, odd people to begin with to even consider stand-up comedy as a career, so you mix that with a culture that includes a lot of drug abuse and alcoholism, and sprinkle in a dash of financial success and you get a recipie for trouble.

But it seems that Chappelle may actually not be doing so horribly after all. According to this article from Time.com, the Man Who Would Be Rick James has just gone down to visit some friends in S. Africa and chill out for a stretch.

The first thing Chappelle wants is to dispel rumors—that he's got a drug problem, that he's checked into a mental institution in Durban—that have been flying around the U.S. for the past week. He says he is staying with a friend, Salim Domar, and not in a mental institution, as has been widely reported in America. Chappelle says he is in South Africa to find "a quiet place" for a while. "Let me tell you the things I can do here which I can't at home: think, eat, sleep, laugh. I'm an introspective dude. I enjoy my own thoughts sometimes. And I've been doing a lot of thinking here."

This sounds reasonable enough to me. It has got to be really unpleasant sometimes to be a celebrity in Los Angeles. Bear with me here...I've thought about this before...Quite often, being a celebrity in LA is probably awesome. You get helped first whenever you go into a store or a restaurant, you can bed pretty much anyone you want, hell you probably even get to see the new Star Wars movie before anyone else.

But it ain't all gravy. You're also constantly surrounded by sycophants who tell you how great you are. Seriously. Imagine every time you went anywhere, anywhere at all, there were crowds of people there just waiting to tell you how great you are. People desperate to talk to you for a few minutes, so they have a story to tell when they get home. People asking you about your life, and really being interested instead of just making bullshit small talk.

It has got to be weird. I would think it immensely unpleasant after a few days, I'd imagine. I think I'd crave real conversation. I'd almost want someone to disagree wtih me or something, just to keep things remotely interesting. So it doesn't surprise me that Dave Chappelle can't stand Los Angeles any more. South Africa does seem a touch far away, particularly when you owe a major cable network several seasons of a TV show in exchange for $50 million.

The problems, he says, started with his inner circle."If you don't have the right people around you and you're moving at a million miles an hour you can lose yourself," he says. "Everyone around me says, 'You're a genius!'; 'You're great!'; 'That's your voice!' But I'm not sure that they're right." And he stresses that Comedy Central was not part of the problem and put no more than normal television restrictions on what he could do.

Eh? See? Do I have a keen insight into the celebrity mind or what? It's from all those afternoons spent fetching Hollywood insiders their DVD's.

I've got to say, it also sounds like Dave's something of an obsessive perfectionist about his work (which is hard to believe from a guy who starred in Blue Streak, but there you go). Surely worrying about quality control for an entire Comedy Central series has got to unnerve a guy over a long-enough stretch of time.

The breakdown in trust within his inner circle seems to have led him to question the material they were producing. He seems obsessed with making sure the material is good and honest and something that he will be proud. "I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling," he says. "What ever decisions I make right now I'm going to have live with. Your soul is priceless." The first two seasons of his show "had a real spirit to them," he says. "I want to make sure whatever I do has spirit."

I'm telling you, this article kind of makes me respect Dave Chappelle in a whole new light. He's genuinely thinking about the content of his TV show, about the responsibility of his form of humor. I'm not saying he's right or wrong about the spirit of "Chappelle Show" (though I don't find it racist or offensive, and certainly wouldn't compare it to minstrelsy or "shuffling"). I just like the fact that he carefully considers the images and ideas he's putting out there into the world, rather than just packaging and marketing what he feels it he most sellable, popular material.

If only the creative teams behind every movie and TV show made these sort of considerations. We'd probably have more "Chappelle Shows" and less Soul Plane's.

And then, check this fabulous quote out (which appeared on Andrew Sullivan's blog first, I will admit).

"I don't normally talk about my religion publicly because I don't want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is a beautiful religion if you learn it the right way. It's a lifelong effort. Your religion is your standard. Coming here I don't have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I'm interested in the kind of person I've got to become. I want to be well rounded and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I've got to check my intentions, man."

Now, see, this is the kind of religious person I can be around and not insult. "I don't normally talk about my religion publicly." Ah...it's like sweet glorious music. It's called humility, people, and guess what? Jesus was kind of all about it.