I’m going to put in jokes that won’t be funny until you rewatch them.”īut a lot of the stuff that I’ve gotten great credit for was just a total accident.
I’d done a lot of callbacks in shows, and by the time I got to “Arrested Development,” I was thinking, “I’m going to call forward. MITCHELL HURWITZ, CREATOR Chance favors the well-prepared. But Chappelle was (and is) an instinctive and equal-opportunity offender he was ready to play with any variety of cultural or racial cliché, as in the sharp sketches on haters and “keeping it real.” Tying it all together is his ineffable, laid-back cool - the eternal wink of the satirist, in Chappelle’s case edged with melancholy and pain. And the sketches that indulge a fixation with women’s breasts haven’t aged well. That may be a problem for many current viewers.
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In the famous Clayton Bigsby sketch, Chappelle played a blind Southern Black man who thought he was white, a confusion that had allowed him to become a celebrated white supremacist - the American dream in action.īeyond the ingenuity of its code crashing and the pop of the scabrous one-liner it built to, the Bigsby sketch was notable for its machine-gun use of a word you can no longer get away with on TV. Bits like the Racial Draft, or a sketch in which Chappelle and Wayne Brady fought to host the show, exploited Chappelle’s fascination with the overlap of Black identity and celebrity image building. Chappelle’s sendups of Black entertainers like Lil Jon and Rick James were brilliant in their brutal simplicity. 1 Source for Offensive Comedy.” It was more transgressive and more wildly inventive, and when it clicked, it could make you laugh dangerously hard.
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“In Living Color” and “The Chris Rock Show” had kicked off the reaction to “The Cosby Show” in the 1990s, making space for TV comedy that dealt unapologetically with race, without the buffers of pithy platitudes and sitcom predictability.īut as popular as those shows were, nothing hit with the gale force of “Chappelle’s Show,” the self-described “No.
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MIKE HALE, TV CRITIC Dave Chappelle’s gloriously unfettered Comedy Central sketch series didn’t come out of nowhere, even if it might seem like a miracle child with two decades’ hindsight. I’m totally envious of him, and that’s why I love doing it so much. I try and put them at ease as best I can - a lot of times I’ll just say, “Don’t worry, I’m human.”īut TV Larry doesn’t care. Because of the show, some people, when they meet me, are very, very leery of the encounter. I don’t think a lot of people see it that way.Ī lot of the conflicts from the show have come from my real life, but I assiduously avoid making enemies, and he seeks them out. My perception is that he’s usually morally on the right side. Conflicts arise, as they invariably do in life, and he has a more direct way of handling them. Please take your masks off for a second so I can see you.” Then I told them it was disappointing and to put them back on immediately. The last day of filming, I said: “OK, I don’t know what any of you look like. In fact, most of the people, I didn’t even know who they were. We wore masks during filming except when we were acting, and the crew wore masks all the time.
I guess I realized that I have more fun doing the show than anything else that I do. I had the long layoff between Seasons 8 and 9, a five-year hiatus. LARRY DAVID, CREATOR AND STAR I’ve had the same expectations for the show as I have for everything else in my life - which is to say, zero. What’s your favorite American comedy of the 21st century? We have no absolute answers, only the arguments that resulted in this list, arranged in chronological order, which we hope prompt you to have the same arguments and more. What even counts as a comedy, in an age of dramedy and comic drama and depressed cartoon horses? How do you account for changing times and mores, jokes that aged badly, stars’ less-than-amusing offscreen offenses? Is there more to a great comedy than how many times it makes you laugh? So picking our 21 favorite American comedies of the 21st century - the tango partner to our list of the 20 best American dramas since “The Sopranos” - involved hard choices and tricky questions. In today’s bumper crop of TV comedy, what funny is not is simple or monolithic. But it can also mean something odd (I have a funny feeling about this) or disconcerting (My stomach feels funny) or suspicious (Are you up to something funny?). What is funny? “Funny” can describe straight-up ha-ha pleasure: watching Lucy Ricardo get drunk on Vitameatavegamin or Homer Simpson fall into Springfield Gorge, twice.