Bitchin'
Chappelle’s Show: Season 2Paramount Home Video
The second season of Chappelle’s Show was promoted by a TV ad in which its star explained that the program’s return was entirely due to the fact that Comedy Central had run out of Reno 911 episodes to repeat. As with so much of Dave Chappelle’s comedy, the spot’s humor drew strength from being partly true. For while Chappelle’s Show: Season 1 recently became the best-selling DVD of a TV series ever, those early episodes made little impact when first broadcast and now too often look like the work of a man unsure of how far even a cable network would let him go.
Season 2, however, looks like the work of a man who just doesn’t care about limits, and is eminently better for it. Take the now legendary “Rick James” episode, a dramatization of cast member Charlie Murphy’s deranged early-’80s encounters with the late superfreak. Most comedians, even most ex-stoner comedians, would have thought twice about turning these punchline-free tales of a disgraced and half-forgotten rock star into even a sketch. Yet Chappelle opted to break form and make an entire episode out of Murphy’s reminiscences—a decision which, combined with nimble writing, the comic’s spot-on impersonation of the drug-addled funkateer and the gurgling presence of James himself, made for an instant comedy classic.
Politically, too, Season 2 has far more bite than its predecessor. “Racial Draft” examines the subject of mixed-race celebrities—Tiger Woods instantly loses all his endorsements after being named officially “black” —while the “Niggars” sketch presents a family of white Leave It To Beaver–types who have the N-word as their surname (“I’ll bet you’ll get the finest table a Niggar ever got in this restaurant,” Chappelle informs the family’s son on encountering him at an eatery). True, there are bum notes, particularly an interminable “What if real life was like the Internet?” sketch. But for most of its duration, this DVD gloriously proves that Rick James was far from the only person involved worthy of being described as a “habitual line-stepper.”
