Chappelle's Show/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Chappelle: "You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid."

  • Dude, Not Funny: At the end of the Time Haters sketch, one of the sketches featured in an episode on sketches that weren't fit to air, Dave's hater persona, Silky Johnson, goes back in time to slavery times and shoots a slave master. Dave warned that the moment brought the skit to a screeching halt and predicted it would bring the episode to a screeching halt. The audience did indeed groan, but they laughed when Dave said, "Apparently shooting a slave master is only funny to me and Neil. If I could, I would do it every episode."
  • Ear Worm: Haters wanna hate/Lovers wanna love/I don't even want/None of the above/I want to piss on you!
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Tron Carter, Silky Johnson.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: During the "Niggar Family" skit, Chappelle's character follows up a collection of n-word puns by saying in a humorous tone, "This racism is killing me inside." After his existential-angst-fueled trip to Africa brought on by the racism of his show, it's hard to laugh at that line, because that racism was killing him inside.
    • In the aftermath of Chappelle's fallout with the show, a lot of humorous but still envelope-pushing moments take on this tone.
    • The Wayne Brady episode gives us an intro of Dave quitting over negotiations for the third season, this line especially stands out following the "Lost Episodes" run:

Network Official: Suit yourself Dave, you've already shot all your sketches. At this point in the season you're replaceable.

  • Guilty Pleasures: Of a sort. The show is intelligently written and well-acted, but it can be very uncomfortable for white fans to realise what they're laughing at.
  • Growing the Beard: The first season was largely ignored until around episode eight, when two sketches aired that basically caught the public's attention: The first was an R. Kelly parody, which had Dave as R. Kelly singing a song making fun of the singer's sexual fetish of pissing and pooping on women. The second was a Real World parody, where Dave made fun of the white people to black people ratio of the show by imagining what would happen if MTV would cast an edition of the show where there was one white guy (comic Christian Finnegan) and the rest of the cast were crazy black people, who mercilessly torment the sole white guy.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: During the "Racial Draft" sketch, Tiger Woods becomes fully black. After clamoring about how he'll be going from eating fried rice to eating fried chicken and getting the chance to say "Fo shizzle", the commentators receive word that he's lost all of his endorsements. After his recent stint as a man who's cheated on his wife with an astronomical number of women and his falling out with the media and some of the people who admired him, Tiger Woods has lost most of his endorsements, to the point that his appearance at the Masters had him with his own logo. Your sympathies towards the man are subjective, of course.

Dave: "Tough break, nigga. There's always FUBU!"

  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The point of the Lost Episodes' "New 2Pac Song" sketch, which pokes fun at "2Pac Lives!" conspiracy theorists.
    • Also the unaired Daddy Day Care sketch became a lot funnier when Daddy Day Camp came out the following year.
  • Memetic Mutation: Rick James, Sam Jackson beer, Wayne Brady's bitch-choking, etc., etc.
  • Misaimed Fandom: One of the factors in Dave Chappelle's Creator Backlash was the realization that a significant chunk of his audience was racist white people taking the racial stereotyping at face value and/or just being titillated by hearing the word "nigger" a lot.
  • Too Good to Last
  • Unfortunate Implications: As noted, the racial humor finally went too far for Dave, such as when someone on the set was laughing at one of the sketches in a way that Dave felt as though he was being laughed at, instead of with.
    • Writer Neil Brennan defended the crew member in question by pointing out that it was just the way that guy laughed at everything.
    • An in-show example would be the theme song for the "Niggar Family" skit, a skit about a white family with an unfortunate last name, which includes the line, "These are the niggars that we like." Considering that the family in question is a very stereotypically white family, this could be seen as implying that the best "niggars" are the ones who act like white people.
      • Wasn't that the point? (That people tend to prefer blacks who "act white"?)