Preface to a Twenty-Volume Dave Chappelle Review, Part Deux

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"What is a black man without his paranoia intact?" Dave Chappelle posed this hypothetical question in an interview with Oprah Winfrey back in 2006. It is a sentence poised on the tip of a fatal ambiguity that is worth scrutinizing, for it tells us a great deal about the ongoing psychodrama of integration of which Chappelle’s life and career is such a revealing case.

The interview concerned Chappelle’s sudden disappearance from public life after signing a $50 million contract to produce a third season of a sketch comedy show that had made him perhaps the most admired and best loved comedian in America. Chappelle’s retort came in response to Oprah noting that “colleagues were saying you were becoming increasingly paranoid,” in the lead up to his abandonment of the show.

Chappelle went on to say: “You might win $100 in a poker game and be on the subway — you're gonna be looking over your shoulder. They just said in everything I had 50 million dollars. That's like making me a marked man.”

The statement implicitly invoked a fear to which he would return repeatedly in the series of Netflix specials that would mark his return to the public eye in the age of Trump, as an older man operating in a changed and changing culture. This was the fear that any black man that succeeded too well would find himself in the crosshairs of the powerful forces in American culture that conspire to keep black men in their place, and to bring them low if they went too high. It was this instinctual fear that caused Chappelle to disbelieve the women who named one of his heroes, Bill Cosby, as a serial rapist.

“Didn’t want to believe it. At first, I didn’t believe it. I said, “These people are obviously trying to destroy Dr. Cosby’s rich legacy.” Even 34 allegations into it, I was still like, “Man… he probably only raped ten or 11 of those people.”

The statement thus refers to paranoia as a quality without which a black man would be directly imperiled. But there is the suggestion of something deeper in the statement, something that impinges on the ontological: that without his paranoia, a black man would cease to be a black man at all. The question is premised on the proposition that to be a black man is to be beset by fear of such intensity that disentangling true from false fears becomes impossible; and that this fear may indeed be a part, perhaps a decisive part, of what constitutes him as a black man. Without those fears, one is justified in asking what he is. What is a black man without his paranoia intact?

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Year Zero is an ongoing inquiry into the ideological fever that overtook the governing and chattering classes of America during the Trump years. Free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is by taking out a paid subscription.

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James Baldwin, writing in the Fire Next Time, claimed that “every American negro risks having the gates of paranoia close in on them.”

“In a society that is entirely hostile,” he went on to write, “and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down—that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day—it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury.”

But of course, both Baldwin’s and Chappelle’s statements refer to paranoia, which is by definition an irrational excess of fear, and to the condition in which such fear has become endemic within an individual or collective mind. To refer to oneself as paranoid is thus in one sense a self-cancelling statement. For a person able to judge rationally the dangers to which they are exposed, and therefore to judge whether the fears by which they are beset are false or true, is not really paranoid, even if they are not always able to distinguish between true and false fear in specific cases.

To be truly paranoid is to be unable to see outside of the self-enclosed system of pathological casuistry wired into the limbic system at a stage preceding conscious thought. To be truly paranoid is not to know the fear is irrational. To be truly paranoid is to forget that one must struggle against paranoia itself as a threat at least as dangerous to oneself as any of the presumed dangers that may or may not be lurking without. To be sufficiently aware of one’s paranoia to name it as paranoia is thus to be aware that one must struggle against it — as one must — and all the more for those whose experiences and histories make them prone to it. One must struggle against paranoia so as to see the world rightly, and indeed, to judge the actual threats one faces, and does not face, so as not to fall victim to the false ones one merely imagines.

Earlier in his interview with Oprah, Chappelle spoke about the moment where his ability to handle the rigors and responsibilities of fame began to unravel for him. He talked in general terms about various actors, within his own team and without, that were seeking to control him — though by his own admission, he was in possession of a virtually absolute creative freedom and control of the show that bore his name. (As Comedy Central chief Doug Herzog put it in 2005, “"He absolutely has complete creative freedom.”)

He then went on to tell Oprah that “I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible.” He described a sketch in which he appears in blackface, as a pixie urging on black people to conform to racist stereotypes.

“The reason I had chosen blackface at the time was — this was going to be the visual personification of the N-word..it was a good spirit or intention behind it…what I didn’t consider is how many people watch the show… and how the way people use television is subjective…”

According to this account, Chappelle was awakened to the fact that the sophisticated meta-comedy of racial stereotyping in which he was engaged, which entailed countless instances of him playing ugly black stereotypes, may not have been received in the terms he intended, by the long and loud laughter of a white subordinate on set.

“When I'm on the set we're finally taping the sketch. Someone on the sketch who's white laughed in such a way…I know the difference between people laughing with me and people laughing at me…and it was the first time I'd ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with…”

Right around this time, according to his co-writer, Neal Brennan Chappelle would come up with ideas, write them, and express enthusiasm for them. “We'd shoot it, and then at some point he'd start saying, 'This sketch is racist, and I don't want this on the air.' And I was like, 'You like this sketch. What do you mean?' There was this confusing contradictory thing: he was calling his own writing racist."

A decade after the mercurial rise and fall of Andrew Dice Clay, who in the span of two years became the biggest selling comedian in history and vanished completely from the entertainment industry after being protested for hateful material and banned from major television networks, the most popular comedian in America canceled himself for violating racial sensitivities. The difference of course is that the person cancelling Chappelle was Chappelle himself, who succumbed to the fear — was it paranoia? — that his show had turned him into a well-remunerated marionette giving license to white people who wanted to revel in racist contempt under the guise of participating in a sophisticated meta-comedy. ““I felt like it had gotten me in touch with my inner ‘coon.’ . . . When that guy laughed, I felt like, man, they got me.”

Chappelle had lost faith in the premise behind the politically incorrect comedy of that time: that a cathartic disgorging of the contents of the racial imaginary could both memorialize the harms of racism and enact our collective triumph over it through the medium of ridicule and shared laughter. He had reached the conclusion that the racial provocations that had earned him an immense fortune (the blackface skit that served as a trigger was not really more extreme than what his show routinely served up) were not what he had once imagined they were. They were instead instances of hateful speech that through their brandishing of ugly stereotypes did harm.

Andrew Dice Clay began as a parody of Italian-American machismo by a Jew from Sheepshead Bay named Andrew Silverstein. He eventually merged with his character in ways that made what began as a sophisticated meta-commentary on the backwardness of ethnic whites into a reactionary recrudescence and celebration of those very attitudes shorn of its saving irony. By the end, it became clear that the distinction was one without a difference to those who mattered, and that his brief rise to fame was a valedictory moment for a culture that had decisively moved beyond those attitudes — a last upsurge of unenlightened, unreconstructed masculinity delivered in parodic, hyperbolic form, before it would be forever shut out.

In the closing moments of 2017’s the Age of Spin, Chappelle returned to the subject of his fallen hero, Bill Cosby. He has made clear that his condemnation of the “54 rapes” to which he has made repeated reference through the night is absolute. But he also memorializes “the valuable legacy that I can’t just throw away.” Among the items that he lists is that “I remember that he partnered up with a clinical psychologist to make sure that there was not one negative image of African-Americans on his show. I’m telling you, that’s no small thing. I’ve had a television show. I wouldn’t have done that shit.” Indeed, the writer-performer who created Tyrone Biggums a decade and a half after the normative image of the American family became one helmed by two black professionals did not do that. He then closes with what he concedes is an unconfirmed story whose significance nonetheless puts into focus the subject of our next dispatch in this ongoing series:

“I heard that when Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said he had a dream, he was speaking into a PA system that Bill Cosby paid for. So, you understand what I’m saying? The point is this: He rapes, but he saves. And he saves more than he rapes. But he probably does rape. Thank you very much! Good night!”

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