As legend goes, right after the success of his runaway hit “Chappelle’s Show,” which had just wrapped is mega-popular second season on Comedy Central, comedian Dave Chappelle was awarded a substantial payday and was expected to fork out a third season. With only 2 seasons under his belt, Chappelle cemented his status as one of comedy’s top talents going so far as to say that he’s this generation’s Richard Pryor. Most people who hit it big and receive more money than most people will see in their lifetimes will fulfill their dreams and aspirations… and buy, buy, buy. What does a black comedian with a multi-million dollar payday do? Well, he rounds up some of his friends and decides to throw a block party in Brooklyn. On principle, the premise is simple: what sets this particular party apart from the parties you’ve ever gone to is who his friends are… and in this particular case they happen to be the hands-down best rap and R&B performers today: Kanye West, Common, Talib Kweli, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Dead Prez, Big Daddy Kane, Cody Chestnutt, The Roots, Mos Def and, if you’ll believe it… The Fugees. All of these artists on one stage, giving a free concert to the residents of Brooklyn. It doesn’t stop there, though; Chappelle then decides to document the proceedings on film, tapping frenchman Michel Gondry (”The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) to take over directorial duties and create a seamless documentary/concert movie that looks and sounds like a total dream.

If you’re not aware of who Dave Chappelle is, then I feel sorry for you. It looks to me that you haven’t enjoyed “funny” for a long time. He’s been in several movies, most notably frontlining the cult classic “Half Baked,” a movie about stoner culture. It’s not until January of 2003 that his comedy sketch show “Chappelle’s Show” first aired on American TV station Comedy Central. The show hit cult status almost instantly, making most skits highly quotable and downright hilarious, his impressions of Lil’ Jon and most notably Rick James part of pop culture and cementing the love of the white man for black culture. Some of the shows most famous characters, via the show’s Wikipedia entry:

Frontline - A spoof of the PBS series of the same name. The first Frontline sketch, Blind Supremacy, featured the life of Clayton Bigsby (played by Chappelle), a biography of a blind white supremacist who is not aware that he is actually a black man. This was in the opening episode of the first season and helped Chappelle gain significant notoriety for the way that the sketch gratuitously used the word “nigger” (mostly spoken by Chappelle’s character). The character is loosely based on Chappelle’s grandfather. It is also one of the most “violent” sketches, involving a man’s head exploding from shock. Other Frontline sketches featured stories of racist animal actors and gay versions of everything from the DMV to the KKK.

 

Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories - Charlie Murphy (who also wrote the sketch) retells events of the 1980s, the most popular being the Rick James story with Murphy as himself and Chappelle as James, including incidents such as James slapping Murphy, interspersed with present-day scenes of the real Rick James explaining his past behavior, saying, “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.” The sketch spawned one of the show’s popular catchphrases, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”, which Chappelle as James repeatedly declares.

The sketch attained even greater public attention when, in 2004, a candidate for city council in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, also named Rick James but unrelated to the singer, had many of his Vote Rick James campaign signs defaced or stolen by fans of the sketch. [1] [2]

 

Black Bush - an African-American “interpretation” of George W. Bush and his administration. It was controversial due to its set-up segment (which had Dave Chappelle mocking fellow comedian Dennis Miller over the comedian’s infamous “free pass” comment regarding not saying anything bad about George W. Bush) and its overall theme that if Bush and his top aides were black, that the public would be more willing to be critical of the President and his decisions. The sketch also features cameo appearances by actor Jamie Foxx, who appears as “Black Tony Blair” and Mos Def as “Black Head of the CIA.”

 

A Moment in the Life of Lil Jon - Chappelle plays rapper/producer Lil Jon doing normal, everyday tasks, with a vocabulary consisting of almost nothing but the words ‘Yeah!’, ‘WHAT?!’, and ‘O-kay!’ The real Lil’ Jon appeared in one sketch, alternating, as does Chappelle’s character, his catchphases with speech in an excessively dignified accent, perhaps as a reference to Lil Jon’s upper middle class background.

 

Samuel Jackson Beer - A parody of the Samuel Adams beer commercials. Features Chappelle as a very profane and extremely loud Samuel L. Jackson dressed in colonial-style clothes as a play on Samuel Adams beer with the eponymous name of the brewer/patriot Samuel Adams. Inspired the catchphrases “It’ll get you drunk!” and “Mm-mmm, bitch!”

 

Wayne Brady’s Show - After Dave Chappelle quits the show in an opening segment that very intriguingly mirrored the contract negotiations for the aborted third season, Wayne Brady takes over as host and is ordered to emcee the remaining episodes of the series since Chappelle had already filmed the remaining sketches (in an ironic twist, this actually occurred when Comedy Central aired the three “Lost Episodes” of the aborted Season Three). After several segments showing Dave at home, missing being on TV (and having his friends, such as Big Boi, suddenly turn their backs on him), Chappelle returns to the show and confronts Wayne Brady. The ensuing confrontation leads to the airing of a flashback to a night of misadventure involving the two that portrays Wayne Brady (contrary to his friendly public image) as a murderous (he snaps a cop’s neck), pimping and seriously disturbed psychopath (a parody of the film Training Day). The sketch spawned the lines “Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?” and “I’m Wayne Brady, bitch!” (In the Season Three bonus features, it’s revealed that Brady was reluctant to say the “choke a bitch” line, even though it was the most important line in the sketch). The skit also contains a popular clip from a previous bit, Negrodamus (about a black Nostradamus), wherein Negrodamus tells someone who asks about Brady’s success, “White people love Wayne Brady, because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X.” Chappelle has said that this clip was the inspiration for the Wayne Brady sketch.

With unparalleled success, Dave decided to use the money he earned from his sketch show and throw this concert for Brooklyn: the result is Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. The movie begins with the premise frontlined by Chappelle himself, megaphone in hand, inviting the people of Brooklyn to come to his party. He then takes himself and the film crew to his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio and invite the people he knows there to his party as well, paying for transport and accommodations. And when I mean people he knows, they’re not people he knows very well; he quite literally gets random people from the street and invites them to the show, handing out golden tickets fashioned from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to people like the old white lady from the convenience store near his ranch, auto mechanics, impressionable teens, and even an entire college marching band which would later join Kanye West as he performed Jesus Walks, uniformed and all. The documentary aspects of the movie focus on the people of Ohio and getting them to New York, but the focus is put more in Brooklyn itself, more specifically the block where said party will go down. There’s a day care center, shops and more, yet the most peculiar of character surely are the couple the lives in an abandoned church placed right behind where the stage was eventually put. They’re weird, singular and cute; a white elderly couple that have been married for more than 40 years who bought a runned-down church and decided to remodel it by hand. They call it “The Broken Angel,” and for good reason: the place is a mess. They’ve been at it for as long as they’ve been married yet it’s admittedly only one third complete as the cameras can tell by simply looking around them..both the place and the couple are incredibly cooky and charming though, and only add to the festive and personal nature of the comedy contained in this movie. You can tell Dave is having a blast getting it together and as he says more than once, it’s the best thing he’s ever done in his career. His charisma is undeniable, and his honesty speaks volumes over his genuine self, making his comedy that much funnier. The balance of performances and the documentary about how it all got together is virtually seamless, and when you have performers such as these then there’s no denying that it was a night to remember for all Brooklyn residents, rain and all.

The performances are absolutely killer, and it kind of makes me regret I didn’t seek out a home theater system in order to experience my first time with this movie as it was intended, with the best sound I could possibly find. The people performing here are quite easily my favorite Rap and R & B artists of the last 5 years and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they all knew each other. No wonder there are so many collaborations (Kanye West and Talib Kweli on “Get ‘Em High,” Common and Kanye West on “The Food,” Mos Def and Talib Kweli as the core members of “Blackstar,” The Roots and Cody Chestnutt for Cody Chesnutt’s own “The Seed,” appropriately titled “The Seed 2.0″ and so on and so forth) between them. All of the performances shown on the film are on-point and awesome, but the most striking (to me, anyway) were The Roots’ “You Got Me” with Jill Scott and Erykah Badu performing the song with so much force it gave me the chills and of course, The Fugees. When Lauryn Hill began to sing “Killing Me Softly” it was just like Praz all but a few second earlier during their rehearsals: it’s like every feud or falling out or whatever reasons they had to separate didn’t matter. He was just about ready to cry, and her amazing vocals haven’t changed one bit since she took a sabbatical from the music industry to raise her child. Wyclef Jean will always be Wyclef Jean, talking to the Ohio University marching band at their school and performing an impromptu version of his song “President” on the piano before telling them something that quite frankly I believe should be heard by the black community worldwide… I won’t spoil it for you, because I’d like you to find this movie and see for yourself. You’re not only getting a great documentary; you’re getting an even greater concert movie. Click here to buy it. Here’s the trailer, and below’s the Fugees performing “Killing Me Softly” at the show:

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