Dave Chappelle ending his six-year hiatus from television with a new show?
According to The Daily, the comedian has been working on material and tinkering with a return that’s as unconventional as his abrupt exit in 2005.
“Dave Chappelle’s going back to TV. It’s not for a network. It’s for Netflix or Crackle or some other subscription service.”
Chappelle of course bailed on his massively popular Comedy Central show, ‘Chappelle’s Show‘ in its third season. He stood to make $50 million in his contract, but walked away following an epiphany on a pilgrimage to South Africa.
“I felt like some kind of prostitute or something. If I feel so bad, why keep on showing up to this place?” he told Oprah at the time.
No deal has been made, but the report indicates Chappelle is looking to bring his talents to a paid-subscription service like Netflix, Hulu or Crackle. All of these online networks have recently ramped up their original content programming. Most notably, Netflix has David Finger’s ‘House of Card,’ priced at $100 million, set to air next year.
In the meantime, Chappelle is working on fresh material at Los Angeles comedy clubs, where one spy told The Daily his set was “really depressing. He was talking about the past, about the show.”
A private jet carrying funnyman Dave Chappelle made an emergency landing last night in Pittsburgh when the pilot deemed Chappelle a “safety risk” because of his erratic behavior.
A source close to the incident claims that Dave went all Tyrone Biggums while on the plane, refusing to buckle his seat belt and repeatedly entering the cockpit and grabbing the pilot’s arm while asking how much longer the flight would last.
Chappelle then checked into a nearby hotel and allegedly told employees there that he wanted to rent a car to drive back to Ohio… except that he couldn’t remember where he lived.
He was seen leaving the hotel this morning, and a rep told TMZ that the entire incident was caused by Dave Chappelle’s need to use the bathroom. The one on the plane just wasn’t the “right kind of bathroom”.
What?
Source: Dave Chappelle Deemed ‘Safety Risk’ on Private Jet [TMZ]
As we all know the end of the decade is upon us and there is lists from everything to do with the best pornstars to the best plates of this decade. So carrying on in this fashion, here is the top 10 best stand-up comedians.
With a cultishly popular MTV show (Human Giant), a flourishing stand-up career, a scene-stealing turn in Judd Apatow’s Funny People, and a blog he actually posts on regularly, it’s only fitting that twentysomething comic Aziz Ansari make our list. Whether he’s hanging with idol Kanye West or bloodying up Ted Leo as “Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru,†Ansari stays connected to the music world while taking us all on the highway to the comedy zone. And watch out, entertainment journos; Ansari recently started writing articles for the likes of Interview. Besides, who else can lay claim to literally being the A to Z of comedy?
Mitch Hedberg was a master at relating simple observational ironies to his audience. His stand-up routine could’ve been achingly unfunny in someone else‘s hands, but an atonal, stream-of-consciousness delivery teased an almost confessional humor out of life’s idiosyncrasies. His death from a drug overdose in 2005 only added to his mystique, transforming him into a cult comedy icon.
Eugene Mirman’s dozens of online video clips and his three brilliant standup albums this decade—along with the work of peers like Zach Galifianakis and Patton Oswalt—have taken comedy in a bold new, hilariously absurd direction. Mirman is the undisputed king of the perfectly executed non-sequitur (“This is a bag of dandelions! These aren’t chicken strips at all!â€), an expert lampooner of all things pop-cultural (check the Mötley Crüe Behind the Music clip at Eug-Tube), and a master at adapting angry screeds to soulless corporations into stage plays. Plus, he’s a Maxim-magazine-certified “sexpert.â€
No one has can pull off the role of the oblivious blowhard like Gervais. The Office showcased his knack for playing a self-important ass, and his brilliant BBC series Extras extracted hilarious performances out of the biggest stars in show business. But the real surprise is how his stand-up comedy sometimes even surpasses his character acting. Emily Riemer
Like more than a couple funny people on this list, Silverman specializes in the thorniest of topics—race. The woman who once delivered a bit about Martin Luther King just couldn’t help herself, even in the get-out-the-vote video below, which mixes earnest enthusiasm for Obama with wicked jokes about ethnicity.
David Cross is alternative comedy‘s renaissance man. He cut his teeth on HBO’s wildly subversive Mr. Show with co-creator Bob Odenkirk, a fellow traveler in L.A.‘s mid-nineties standup circuit. Cross spent the next decade and a half headlining tents at festivals and appearing in music videos with Yo La Tengo and the New Pornographers, becoming indie-dom’s patron saint of irony. He’s played cultural critic, antagonist and slaughterer of sacred cows on two stand-up albums to date (released on Sub Pop, natch), the first of which earned a Grammy nod. And in 2003, he pulled his analrapist stocking over his head for a turn as Tobias Fünke in the now-legendary Arrested Development.
Although he first hit it big in the ‘90s, Rock became comedy royalty in the 2000s. While he was making fluffy, mainstream films like Madagascar, he never shied away from edgy comedy, and his HBO specials and stand-up appearances from the 2000s are among his best, sharply skewering black culture, politics and even Oprah.
I’m not a big fan of stand-up comedy, but the first time I heard a Patton Oswalt bit I immediately felt a deep, emotional bond with that round little man. His rant about KFC’s Famous Bowls—which I’d lamented over with friends but never so eloquently as his definition: “a failure pile in a sadness bowlâ€â€”has become kind of an annoying Thing (even to him, I think—when I saw him in February, he chastised a guy for requesting it between jokes), but it perfectly encapsulates what I love about him. Oswalt has this deep sense of cultural shame that radiates outward but also pierces deep into his own psyche—he knows how ridiculous everything is, but knows, too, he’s no better than anyone else. He’s funnier than just about everyone else, though, so that helps a lot.
In 2008, we described Zach Galifianakis’ act thusly: “a mix of the hyper-intelligent and the low-brow—blink-and-you’ll-miss-them absurdist nuggets. Sometimes the joke is simply the mispronunciation of a word, other times it’s in pushing a button that’s particularly taboo with his audience.†Since then, the dude’s blown up a little bit, starring in blockbuster movies (The Hangover) and critically acclaimed television (HBO’s Bored to Death), while having many an awkward moment on his web series, Between Two Ferns. Did we mention he’s got a beard that just won’t quit? Catch him live if and when you can.
The funniest man of the decade spent some well-documented time off the grid, then emerged from seclusion to assure everyone that he wasn’t crazy, a crackhead or a crazy crackhead. It’s no wonder speculation was so intense: When he stepped into the spotlight—whether on his side-splitting Comedy Central show or in a stand-up setting—Dave Chappelle was supernaturally magnetic. You couldn’t take your eyes off him, couldn’t stop laughing, and couldn’t help yourself from watching to see which taboo he’d skewer next. Race was his specialty, as evidenced in the clip below, which contains his immortal “Terrorists do not take black hostages†bit.
I’m not a big fan of Stand-Up but this list is pretty spot on in my opinion. Thoughts?
source: The 10 Best Comedians of the Decade (2000-2009) [Paste]
Presenting The 25 Funniest People in America. From Conan O’Brien to Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey to Craig Ferguson, let’s count down the names of the entertainers who make us laugh the hardest.
25. AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
Burroughs’ best-selling memoir Running with Scissors — about being raised by a nutso shrink who studies his poo and rents the back shed to a pedophile — is unbelievably disturbing. And sidesplitting. At first we felt guilty giggling at his adventures with an electroshock therapy machine, but Burroughs knows that laughter is the best antidepressant. Much better than booze, which the author struggles to kick in his equally effervescent follow-up, Dry.
24. CATHERINE O’HARA
After her run on SCTV in the late ’70s, Hollywood didn’t know what to do with O’Hara. Fortunately, Christopher Guest did. In Waiting for Guffman, she and Fred Willard are tracksuit-wearing answers to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire; in Best in Show, she’s a onetime floozy with a prize terrier and a torrid past; and in A Mighty Wind, O’Hara shows off a subtler comic touch, proving that humor doesn’t always mean a pie in the face.
23. SARAH SILVERMAN
The Lenny Bruce of the 21st century might be this hot, foul-mouthed, button-punching stand-up. Silverman is ruthlessly funny about topics like sex, the Holocaust, and 9/11, which may be why The Sarah Silverman Program has a permanent slot on our DVR. Oh, and if you hadn’t heard, she’s f—ing Matt Damon.
22. DAVE CHAPPELLE
The fact that Diamond Dave is all but absent from the comedic stage these days doesn’t invalidate his funny. After all, Chappelle’s revered Comedy Central show — on which the wiry comic gleefully engaged in crass T&A humor, swore like a sailor, and mocked everyone in the multiculti rainbow, confronting race in a way that is positively Pryor-esque — is still the best sketch comedy this country has seen in more than a decade. For that alone, he deserves a spot on any list like this.
21. DEMETRI MARTIN
You know what’s funny? Palindromes and anagrams. ”Shut up, Grandma,” you say, but we say shut up yourself and watch Demetri Martin work a stand-up mic. ”A drunk driver’s very dangerous. Everybody knows that. But so is a drunk backseat driver — if he’s persuasive.” The floppy-haired heir to Steven Wright won a prestigious award at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, taking him from the comedy underground to…the comedy slightly less underground.
20. DIABLO CODY
Not to be partial, but the newly minted Oscar winner showed off her comedic — and emotional — chops with her debut screenplay for Juno. Did we mention it won an Oscar?
19. CRAIG FERGUSON
Late night is the province of the mono-name. Jay! Dave! Conan! Then there’s that Scottish guy, two-name ID required: Craig Ferguson. You know, the one who can’t quite be pinned down. Since taking over CBS’ Late Late Show from Craig Kilborn in 2005, Ferguson has brought a fresh burst of energy to the format. He’s reinvented the opening monologue, doing away with most of the topical jokes and just ad-libbing about his life. Along with fresh energy, he’s brought something else — ratings. Ferguson, 45 and a brand-spanking-new U.S. Citizen, doesn’t get as much media attention as time-slot competitors Jimmy Kimmel or Conan, but with an audience of just under 2 million, the great Scot outperforms the former and has climbed within 500,000 viewers of the latter.
18. JACK BLACK
Black is an entirely new classification of human: the frenetic slacker. Before his turn as doofus band reject/inspirational teacher Dewey Finn in School of Rock, he was the Ritalin-deprived half of Tenacious D (along with his partner, Kyle Gass) and the list-obsessed record-shop shlub in High Fidelity. He is, inarguably, the coolest fusion of music and comedy since Spinal Tap. (And, if Tropic Thunder is as good as we’ve been led to believe, we’ll forgive him that whole Nacho Libre business.)
17. DAVID LETTERMAN
With a receding hairline and a jogger’s grim jowls, Dave is no one’s idea of a hip comic, and he likes it that way. New-school gone old-school, the upstart who first pumped irony into the talk show still rails against the stupidity of the powerful and yet has the charm to melt Julia Roberts.
16. AMY SEDARIS AND DAVID SEDARIS
Big brother is the best-selling author of the sublime autobiographical essay collections Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked, full of terrific riffs about stuff like his cuckoo-clock North Carolina clan and his midget guitar teacher. Little sis was the rubber-faced star of Comedy Central’s truly strange Strangers With Candy, as well as coauthor of the book Wigfield.
15. WILL FERRELL
See, there’s this man-child who latches onto Will Ferrell in most every role he plays — and good luck getting the little guy to let go. As a result, we are treated to inspired displays of dolt-trapped-in-the-headlights hijinks, be it in the form of Old School’s keghead Frank the Tank (who goes from repressed to regressed to undressed) or Talladega Nights’ Ricky Bobby, the dumbest, most earnest NASCAR driver on the circuit — who’s also the most comfortable with his sexuality.
14. RICKY GERVAIS
Okay, so he doesn’t spend all that much of his time in America. We don’t care. Whether as the creator of The Office and Extras, a supporting actor in movies like For Your Consideration or Night at the Museum, or doing killer stand-up (as seen most recently in Grand Theft Auto IV), he’s still as funny as the dog’s bollocks.
13. ELLEN DEGENERES
DeGeneres, whose career seemed all but kaput a few years ago, has earned back adoration simply by being her affably dry self on the Emmy-winning The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Whether it’s her circuitous monologues, her deadpan celebrity interviews, or that vocal turn as Dory in Finding Nemo, she remains one of the cleanest, coolest funny ladies around.
12. DAVID CROSS
All conversations about his genius start here: Along with Bob Odenkirk, he created the cunning HBO sketch series Mr. Show, which routinely put SNL to silly shame. And not only does Cross work little miracles in supporting roles (remember his role as feckless freak-job Tobias on Fox’s Arrested Development?), he can drop some pretty fearsome stand-up (who else talks about being raped by the Virgin Mary?). Simply put, this dude never kowtows for his funny.
11. CONAN O’BRIEN
Smarty-pants isn’t usually a compliment, but O’Brien wears them so well. When this Harvard geek isn’t riffing on Muammar Gaddafi in his monologue, he’s making absurd innovations in low-brow comedy. Now, let’s see if those absurd innovations will play on The Tonight Show….
The Saturday Night Live scene-stealer has found her stride in her third season, thanks to breakout characters like the Target clerk and the obsessively competitive Penelope, as well as spot-on impressions of Jamie Lee Curtis and Suze Orman.
9. LARRY DAVID
Because he’s a balding, neurotic, self-consumed, multimillionaire malcontent who reacts to most social interactions as if he just took a whiff of some really bad cheese. Because the only thing he hates more than these situations is himself. Because he’s the most hilariously doomed white-guy antihero we’ve ever seen, and has no problems taking on every sacred cow. Because we have no idea how much of this Larry David — from the HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm — is swiped from the real Larry David. And because both Larry Davids co-created one of the best comedies ever, Seinfeld.
8. AMY POEHLER AND WILL ARNETT
The funniest married couple on the list. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann.) When they’re apart (she, on Saturday Night Live and in Baby Mama; he, late of Arrested Development and currently guesting on 30 Rock), they’re great. But when they’re together, as when they played brother-and sister figure skaters in Blades of Glory, they’re resplendent. So let’s get those crazy kids together more often, shall we?
7. MATT STONE AND TREY PARKER
Now in their eleventh season of South Park, these potty mouths with a purpose continue to remind us what full creative control gets you: moments so wrong, they’re right (Ben Affleck falling in love with Cartman’s hand comes to mind). Added bonus: The ninth season episode, ”Trapped in the Closet” contains the most sober explanation of the background of Scientology you’ll ever hear.
6. CHRIS ROCK
Television failed him (Saturday Night Live didn’t know what to do with his bright-bulb humor, and his HBO talk show couldn’t contain him). The movies didn’t get him (though this is as much Rock’s fault as anyone’s, given he wrote and directed his most recent starring vehicles, the underperforming Head of State and I Think I Love My Wife). But on the stage, Rock is a man on a mission, mercilessly tackling race, religion, money, and relationships. And his missionaries are legion.
5. STEVE CARELL
Sometimes, it hurts so good. The pain, the discomfort, the agony of watching Carell’s Michael Scott work himself into another awkward scenario on NBC’s The Office…and almost work himself out. And the fact that we don’t hate Michael — on the contrary, we feel a warm, chocolatey pity for him — is a testament to Carell, who leavens the bald incompetence with wide-eyed awe.
4. JON STEWART AND THE ‘DAILY SHOW’ TEAM
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is the most consistent laugh machine on TV — and the only news source for scores of cynics and slackers. It’s not often that a comedy show can tackle politics, embrace a cogent point of view, and still maintain its anarchic spark. The scribes at The Daily Show pull it off four nights a week. As the heart and soul of the show, Stewart is evenhanded but never meek; as an interviewer, he can make his guests comfortable even as he’s taking them apart. Then there’s his gang of ”correspondents,” who soldier straight-facedly into the great American absurd and take no prisoners. Empirically speaking, there’s nothing funny about what’s going on in the world right now. Yet here we are each week, chortling.
3. TINA FEY
It takes a certain self-confidence to play a woman who accidentally dates her third cousin, erroneously assumes her neighbor is a terrorist, and gets called the C-word by a colleague (especially when said character is based on you). ”I love going to those uncomfortable places,” says Fey, who stars as 30 Rock’s workaholic TV maven and is also the NBC show’s creator and exec producer. ”I’ll go down any weird avenue.” Maybe this year’s surprise Emmy win for best comedy will empower Fey to pursue some dreams for her alter ego. ”Liz Lemon could do an international adoption for a Russian baby and get the paperwork wrong with the European dates and somehow end up with a huge, muscular 13-year-old. Yeah, I could see that.” Hopefully we will too.
2. STEPHEN COLBERT AND THE ‘COLBERT REPORT’ TEAM
The once (and, we’re sure, future) presidential nominee, author, and dedicated windbag also happens to be one of the smartest satirists working today. Heck, if all the dude had on his resume was the legendary 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, he’d go down in comedy history. But week-in and week-out, Colbert takes aim at the political-industrial complex — and I don’t care if there’s no such term — and spins the facts into truth. Or truthiness. Whichever’s easier.
1. THE JUDD APATOW POSSE
Can you even remember what movie comedy looked like before writer-director-producer Judd Apatow and his ever-expanding comedy clan (including Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Jonah Hill, and Paul Rudd) came along last summer with two stiff shots of cathartic humor — the oops-she’s-preggers romp Knocked Up and the high school raunchfest Superbad? Today, when studio execs have a comedy that feels flat or formulaic, the call goes out to ”Judd it up” — sweet irony for a man once best known for critically beloved flops like TV’s Freaks and Geeks. ”It was always my dream to become a verb,” Apatow deadpans. ”That’s what I wrote in my high school yearbook.”
Bobby Brown must think everything his urine touches, turns to gold. Why else would Bobby think it’s “a-ok” to piss on another individual?
What the hell is wrong with this guy?
The 39-year-old singer Bobby Brown was caught on on camera trying to urinate on Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider on the U.S. Big Brother-style country music show ‘Gone Country’. The ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ chart-topper walked up to Snider in his sleep and dropped his pants.
“I’m laying in my bed and all of a sudden I hear Bobby Brown stirring. He started walking over to my night table and he was getting his junk out. First of all I thought I was going to be raped by Bobby Brown then I was like, ‘He’s going to pee on me.’ I started snapping my fingers to get his attention and I’m shouting, ‘Bobby, Bobby, Bobby – that’s the toilet over there. Next thing he headed to the door of the room and was about to pee there – so I’m shouting no, no. His next stop was our closet, I was picturing him spraying all our clothes down, I’m like, no no! Finally he went into the bathroom and heard it hit water, rather than tile or wall.â€
An apologetic Brown said: “This sleepwalking has been bothering me for years. I need help. If there’s anyone out there who helps sleepwalkers who pee, please call me.â€
On Saturday, Dave Chappelle checked into an L.A. emergency room, and was released a few hours later. “It was exhaustion; he had been traveling,” his rep said. “He’s fine.”
My question is, how is he exhausted? I haven’t heard about Chapelle since he left his $50 million contract at Comedy Central and went on a “spiritual retreat” to South Africa to help with the stress.
Apparently he’s been doing standup, and even broke the endurance record at the Laugh Factory in April by performing his routine for more than six hours. I guess that could make you tired.
Now that he’s back on the standup circuit, Dave Chappelle has a lot to say. The comic, who walked out on a $50 million deal to continue his TV show and briefly took a respite in South Africa, shattered the Laugh Factory’s endurance record by taking to the comedy club’s stage for six hours and seven minutes on Sunday.
“He was absolutely amazing, for six hours making people laugh,” the club’s owner, Jamie Masada, said Tuesday.
Masada said the previous record of three hours and 50 minutes was accomplished earlier this month by Dane Cook . But until then the mark had stood at two hours and 41 minutes since Richard Pryor set it in 1980.
Chappelle walked out on the third season of his hit Comedy Central show last May, leaving fans and industry observers to question his motives and even his sanity.
He has said since that he didn’t feel he could be himself on the show.
“The bottom line was, white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that’s familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?” he told Esquire magazine.
He has since returned to the standup circuit and released the documentary “Dave Chappelle ‘s Block Party.”
Dave Chappelle doesn’t regret his decision to walk away from a $50 million deal to continue his hit Comedy Central television show. However, he might miss the money.
Halting his “Chappelle’s Show” two years ago was “one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life,” the comedian said Tuesday while addressing the opening convocation at Central State University.
“Now, economically it makes no sense at all,” he added.
Ya think? But, frankly, it’s not like the man is having trouble putting food on the table.
Dave Chappelle left his $50 million television deal behind because he was oppressed by whitey.
Dave Chappelle says in a new interview that he had several reasons for walking away from his cult-fave “Chappelle’s Show” — and a deal worth more than $50 million. His decision to leave the Comedy Central series last May led fans and industry executives to question his motives, and his sanity.
But in a 10-page spread in the Esquire magazine arriving Saturday, he says he closed “Chappelle” for reasons cultural, professional and personal.
Culturally: “The bottom line was, white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that’s familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?”
Professionally: “I felt like I was really pressured to settle for something that I didn’t necessarily feel like I wanted.”
Personally: “The thing about show business is that, in a way, it forces dysfunctional relationships in people.”
Chappelle tells the magazine that putting on “Chappelle’s Show” was the best television experience he ever had. He plans to continue telling jokes and entertaining audiences, he says, so long as he can retain a degree of personal and creative freedom.
Actually, my copy of Esquire arrived in the mail a couple of days ago.
And one cure for white people owning everything is a black man spending his $50 million on some stuff. That’d be $50 million worth of stuff not owned by whitey, no?
As to “where can a black person go and be himself or say something that’s familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize” how about a cable television show named after yourself for which you’re paid $50 million? Having watched every episode by now, I can’t imagine what it is that he wanted to say that he was not permitted to say. Unless it was some white guy forcing all of those doo-doo jokes on him.
The 39-year-old singer Bobby Brown was caught on on camera trying to urinate on 
