Dave Chappelle - The Man

Dave Chappelle put together a free block party in Brooklyn and the result is this exuberant mix of hip-hop, rap and comedy. The documentary is often laugh-out-loud funny and the music (which includes a reunion performance from the Fugees) is electrifying.

Dave Chappelle knows how to party. About 18 months ago, Chappelle organized a big concert for the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. The filmed result of this high energy event is Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a friendly and hugely entertaining mix of humour and music. At the beginning the host himself says, "This is the concert I've always wanted to see."

Well, yes -- and who wouldn't? The concert Chappelle has put together includes performances (and chit-chat) from Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Common, Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, The Roots, Wyclef Jean, Dead Prez and Kanye West, among others, and features the Fugees together for the first time in several years.

Chappelle sets the stage with odd and endearing bits of quiet comedy. He walks around his current neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio, inviting various locals to the concert in Brooklyn and distributing special gold tickets for the occasion.

He gets one of his acquaintances -- a white, middle-aged cashier from a Dayton convenience store -- to come along to the show, and he then convinces the band master of Ohio's Central State University marching band to let the entire band get on a bus for Brooklyn and the concert. And he drives through Brooklyn with a loudspeaker, yelling out the window that people should come.

The structure of Dave Chappelle's Block Party is what you might call meandering, but it works, and mostly through sheer force of will and humour on Chappelle's part. He leads the cameras into the local Salvation Army store to find furniture needed for the concert. Once there, he plays the piano and chats about the connection between musicians and comics.

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Cable TV star Dave Chappelle is a comedian known for racially-charged and sometimes raunchy humor, earning him comparisons to the 1970s comedy superstar Richard Pryor. Chappelle started doing stand-up comedy in Washington, D.C. when he was a teenager. Just after high school he went to New York, where he quickly became a regular on the comedy club circuit.

A year later he was in Hollywood, lured by development deals for TV shows and the chance to appear in movies. After years of false starts and small parts, Chappelle hit the big time in 2003 with Chappelle's Show, a cable TV comedy series made up of skits, short films and impressions of celebrities such as Samuel L. Jackson and Rick James.

In 2004 Chappelle signed a deal for two more seasons and a guaranteed paycheck reported to be $50 million. In late 2004, however, he halted production on his show and postponed the new season "indefinitely." In May of 2005 he suddenly dropped out of sight, turning up two weeks later explaining that he had gone to a friend's in South Africa to relieve the stress of his success.

His TV show over, Chappelle returned to doing stand-up comedy. His film credits include Half Baked (1998), You've Got Mail (1998, starring Tom Hanks) and Undercover Brother (2002, with Denise Richards).

In 2005 the the first season of Chappelle's Show surpassed the first season of The Simpsons as the best-selling TV series on DVD.

"I still think people do have racial hang-ups, but I think one of the reasons I can joke about it is people are shedding those racial hatreds."

"I like that particular kind of attention. People don't know what it's like standing up there onstage, when you have a wall of people smiling at you."

"I have a venue to do that. I get paid to do that. It's not like I'm doing heavy lifting up there. It's not like I'm solving the world's problems. It's like I'm hanging out with a bunch of people and it's cool."

"I felt in a lot of instances I was deliberately being put through stress because when you're a guy who generates money, people have a vested interested in controlling you."

"I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible. I felt I was deliberately being encouraged and I was overwhelmed."