Dave Chappelle & Tupac Shakur: Truth In Stand Up & Art

Stand Up comedy might be my favourite art form, when it’s done right. I mean that genuinely, I love my favourite stand up comics, specials & bits, more than I love most of my family members. Good bits are like songs that I can hear, over and over again, because they inspire something in me. I honestly go back & rewatch Dave Chappelle's Tale of Iceberg Slim at least once a month because I believe its a beautiful piece. I go to standup in order to see an interesting person's unfiltered perspective, because standup is one of the only remaining genres that operates on Truth.

I remember the first time I ever watched a stand up special. It was on a Saturday in 2008, I was 9 years old, living in Kuwait at the time, my brothers and I would usually go to the movies on weekends, we were all dressed up & ready to go watch The Spiderwick Chronicles, but something came up & my parents told us we weren’t allowed to go.

There’s nothing worse for a kid than when your parents promise that you were going somewhere, and then change their mind. We were distraught, but to make up for it, my parents told us we were allowed to order pizza as consolation. So we all sat in front of the tv, my dictator older brother held the remote control & was mindlessly turning channels, while the rest of us were eating slices like a bunch of jaded seniors in a home. He finally landed on Showtime, and there was this guy speaking on a stage, for a show called “Minorities Rule!”

I had no idea what I was watching. I knew what stand up comedy was, but I had never seen an actual set. The comedian speaking was named Ronnie Khalil, he was an American-Egyptian comic, doing bits around his personal life as an Arab-Muslim person, growing up in a western world, & as a Muslim person, who grew up among Arabs in Arab culture, in a Western world, I understood the bits & related to them. What he was saying was true, I could see myself in what he was saying. I remember almost peeing my pants while watching that set, I didn’t know people could do that as a job.

Laughter is cross cultural, it's one of the most important things in human gatherings. I’ve always wanted to be around the funniest people & I’ve always easily laughed. Growing up, the most important thing was looking for a laugh, anyway we could get it. Laughter is how we bond with other people, those little glimpses you share with someone in class that lets you know, they just noticed the same funny thing that you just noticed, that shared truth is the building block of love, friendship & unity. The fact that someone could take control of that, and do it on a mass level, and have thousands of people connecting on that same honest perspective, blew my mind.

That sent my brothers & I on a quest, to watch every single comedian & special we could come across. It became how we bonded, we would sit down around the television with my dad & try to show him our favourite comedy specials. I would spend every minute I could as a teenager watching specials, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries, interviews, I would go on YouTube and watch Red Foxx specials, old Carlin, Pryor, Bill Hicks, Eddie Murphy and Lenny Bruce specials. I was just trying to learn about what type of person would do this, and what exactly it was they were doing.

I was a little kid that was afraid to speak in class, & it was insane to me that someone could stand up in front of all those people & say all those things they would say, it was marvelous. My favourite comics shaped my worldview as a human. Guys like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Bill Burr & Patrice O’neal, have shaped how I look at the world, through their art. It was a trojan horse, & I thought it was the coolest thing on Earth, even at the time. I remember realizing it with Dave Chappelle.

Chappelle is my favourite comedian, for a lot of reasons that I have mentioned trillions of times before, but I quickly realized why. Dave makes me laugh really hard, but after I’m done with his specials, I’m thinking about the material, it was a profound & insightful truth, that was disguised as a joke. That's what I saw in all of my favourite comedians. My favourite comedians subvert social truth in their performance art, like Epic theatre, which is a dramatic form developed in Germany after World War I by Bertolt Brecht and others, intended to provoke rational thought rather than to create illusion. The purpose of epic theatre is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their world as it is. Guys like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K, Chris Rock & George Carlin make you think about harsh social truths, instead of giving you an escape from the world, but they disguise it with humour, which gives us all a shared perspective of reality.

The truth is disguised behind the laughter, because if my teacher made the exact same point, I would sleep in class. My favourite comedians made thinking for ourselves cool, and they all focused on truth first.

For a lot of my teenage years, I really wanted to be a comedian. Comedians could go in front of people, tell the truth, say wild things & get away with it, which is something kids are constantly trying to do.

Being a kid, at least in my childhood, was just trying to get away with things. That attempt at getting away with things has always stuck with me as a creative person, that is what I am constantly trying to do, & that has always been what drew me to comedy.

Jerry Seinfeld has described crafting a great bit as “dodging laser beams.” That's exactly what it feels like watching a masterful comedian with great bravura assert his position, you’re amazed that he’s able to land the punchline, with that rhythm. Dave Chappelle is able to craft a stream of consciousness with anecdotes, narratives, philosophical inquiries, & mythology, before hitting you with a punch line out of thin air. Comedians are like daredevils, and a joke that works is sticking the landing across the grand canyon. We love when a comic words his horrible and frightening thought, in a palatable, humorous & truthful way. That feeling of trying to stay up late & stay on your phone under a blanket, or talk in class by passing notes, that is what every artist chases.

Kids & creatives have barely any freedom in society, so artists, like comedians, seem like the most free people. Nina Simone once defined Freedom as having “no fear” & for a kid with a lot of opinions and a fear of public speaking, comedians seemed like the most fearless & most free people in society.

I believe there’s something so noble & chivalrous about the artform. Most comedians aren’t rich, they are just people that have something they need to get off their chest, & are trying to make people laugh along the way.