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Salem Press

Great Lives from History: African Americans

Dave Chappelle

by Melinda Jo King

Entertainer

Best known for his self-titled Comedy Central show, Chappelle has had a long career as a comedian, actor, writer, and producer. His comedy has ranged from lowbrow marijuana humor to controversial racial material that sparked conversation about common stereotypes.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment: comedy; Radio and television

Early Life

David Khari Webber Chappelle (shuh-PEHL) was born in Washington D.C. to William David Chappelle III and Yvonne Reed Chappelle. Both of Chappelle’s parents were college professors, and his mother was a leader in establishing African American studies as a major college field of study. After spending most of his childhood in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, Chappelle was sent by his mother to live with his father at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1983, when he and his older brother reached an age at which she feared they could get caught up in street life. Chappelle returned to Washington as a teenager and saw the damage that had been done by the crack epidemic of the late 1980’s. Chappelle was always aware of race, from sensing a difference in how he was treated compared with his lighter-skinned family members, to recognizing the divide between Washington’s rich whites and poor African Americans, and how that segregation intensified after the crack epidemic hit the city.

Dave Chappelle.

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As the youngest of three, Chappelle had a natural tendency toward humor that he often used to break tension. At the age of fourteen, he took a serious interest in comedy. He began observing stand-up comics at local comedy clubs, taking note of what made some jokes work and others not. The owners of the comedy club encouraged him to take acting classes if he intended to go into stand-up comedy himself. This encouragement led him to leave public high school for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts to study, among other subjects, theater, scriptwriting, and improvisation.

Life’s Work

At fourteen, Chappelle started performing on amateur nights at the comedy clubs that he frequented. He was inspired to try his comedy in New York after reading about Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s experiences there as young musicians learning from other musicians and picking up the energy of the city. As a rising star, his comedy earned him appearances on Russell Simmons’s Def Comedy Jam and Whoopi Goldberg’s Comic Relief. Chappelle’s first film role came in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights in 1993. After a few small roles in The Nutty Professor (1996) and Con Air (1997), Chappelle took center stage when he cowrote and starred in Half-Baked (1998), a comedy in which Chappelle’s character learns to live without marijuana. Chappelle continued acting and doing stand-up specials, such as Dave Chappelle: Killin’ Them Softly in 2000. He generated enough revenue from those roles that in 2003 he was able to finance the first season of Chappelle’s Show, giving him artistic freedom to say what he wanted to say. In the series, which aired on Comedy Central, Chappelle poked fun at racist attitudes in sketches. One well-known sketch featured Clayton Bigsby, a blind white supremacist who discovers late in life that he is in fact African American. Other skits involved the Niggar Family, an ideal 1950’s family whose last name happens to be Niggar, and the“Race Draft,” in which various races choose which celebrities to “adopt.” In 2005, Chappelle released the documentary film Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, in which he threw a block party in New York’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood and invited his favorite hip-hop artists to perform. That same year, instead of returning to Comedy Central to film the third season of Chappelle’s Show, he walked away from a fifty-million-dollar contract and took a trip to South Africa to gain perspective.

Significance

Chappelle’s comedy references history to question social mores and point out the absurdities in everyday life. Through comedy, he has created opportunities to discuss race in popular culture. His decision to walk away from a successful show because of fears that his comedy was being misconstrued showed that he felt a responsibility to his art and his message. After leaving Comedy Central, Chappelle moved back to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to raise his family. He returned to stand-up comedy, where he had full control over his comedy and where his message could remain his own.

Further Reading

1 

Cobb, William Jelani. “The Devil and Dave Chappelle.” In The Devil and Dave Chappelle, and Other Essays. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007. Commentary on Chappelle’s decision to walk away from his contract with Comedy Central, including comparison of Chappelle’s and Richard Pryor’s trips to Africa and the transformations in their work that resulted from those trips.

2 

Katz, David. “What’s So Funny About Race: An Interview with Dave Chappelle.” In The High Times Reader, edited by Annie Nocenti and Ruth Baldwin. New York: Nation Books, 2004. This brief article about Chappelle’s Show includes an interview discussing Chappelle’s life and the inspirations for his skits.

3 

Wisniewski, K. A., ed. The Comedy of Dave Chappelle: Critical Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2009. Collection of essays from various scholars that approach Chappelle’s comedy from different angles, including discussions of racial politics, Chappelle’s handling of taboo topics, gender, and identity construction. An excellent source for students of popular culture.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
King, Melinda Jo. "Dave Chappelle." Great Lives from History: African Americans, edited by Carl L. Bankston, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLAA_116755596730.
APA 7th
King, M. J. (2011). Dave Chappelle. In C. L. Bankston (Ed.), Great Lives from History: African Americans. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
King, Melinda Jo. "Dave Chappelle." Edited by Carl L. Bankston. Great Lives from History: African Americans. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.