[Dave Chappelle] This... is... surreal.
[cheering and applause]
In 1987...
from Ohio to D.C.
And-- and-- and enrolled
in Eastern High School,
-and did...
-[audience member] Whoo!
You must not have went there
when I went there, champ.
Those were tough times
is the way I remember it.
[chuckles]
[groans]
When I had gone, I-- I had
lived with my father for three years.
I went to middle school in Ohio,
and when I'd gotten back to Washington,
the cr*ck epidemic was in full swing,
and the city was
largely unrecognizable to me.
Now I was an older kid, and-- and--
and kids my age were doing a lot of
wild things that I-- I didn't know
that kids would do.
I-- I'd never seen a kid
with a pager before,
I didn't know anything about
selling dr*gs, any of that sh*t.
All I knew, every day when I went
to Eastern, I didn't feel safe.
[groans]
I'm a quiet guy, naturally.
I'm a shy person, naturally.
And I used to get my
hair cut on a barbershop
on 15th Street Northeast.
And I would go there, and, uh...
and everyone in the barbershop
would just snap on each other.
And I'd sit in the corner,
and I-- and I'd watch everybody,
and just listen to all these jokes.
The guys were funny as sh*t,
but-- but one day,
after a few weeks of goin' there
and gettin' my hair cut,
they-- they-- they turned the jokes on me.
I call that day The Barbershop m*ssacre.
I lit everybody in that barbershop up,
I had been sittin' in there
listening to 'em for weeks
talk about each other,
I knew every inside joke about each
and every one of 'em,
and they couldn't believe
I knew this stuff.
I lit their asses up.
From then on in the neighborhood,
people kind of liked me, like, "Okay...
he's pretty funny."
Time magazine released an article
about Bill Cosby.
The headline said,
"Fifty, Funny, and Filthy Rich,"
and I read that article and it was
when I was looking at his face,
before all that disgrace,
that I looked and I said,
"I could do that."
I told my father and my father said,
"Well, then just do it."
I said, "Well, I wouldn't even know
where to start," and he said,
"Well, look in the phone book."
It's before the internet, if you're young.
We used to have a book
with phone numbers in it.
My father found for me the local
comedy club in Washington, D.C.
I called 'em...
I found out when Open Mic night was,
and I started to go there
on Tuesday nights... and just watch.
And then one night I went on a weekend.
I would-- I would get my money together
and I would go to this comedy club
and I would just watch these comedians,
and sometimes...
sometimes they would talk to me.
And I told one of the comedians
after the show one night, I said,
"Man, I really wanna try to do this."
And-- and he said, "Well..." He said...
He said, "If you wanna be a good comedian,
you should know how to act."
I said, "Why?" And he says, you know...
He didn't explain it.
I said, "Okay," and I told my parents,
and-- and this is how I came to find out
about Duke Ellington. My mother,
she said, "There's a place you can go
where you can learn to act
right in Washington. It's a-- It's a high
school." I said, "You mean I would...
get out of Eastern?"
The school year was already in full swing
and Ellington has a policy that
they don't let people just come
in the middle of the year,
but Lynda Gravatt was the head
of the theater department at the time.
Very graciously took a meeting
with me and my mother, and...
I get emotional thinking about it.
Anybody that went here?
[crowd cheers]
Remember what it was first like?
-[audience members] Yes! Yes!
-When you first walked through the door?
It was in the afternoon, and everyone
was in their arts classes,
and the girls had tutus on,
and everyone was weird, and walking around
the hallway, like, you weren't sure
where anyone was supposed to be,
and you could hear people
practicing their horns and sh*t
all through the hallways.
There was art bouncing off the walls,
the minute I walked through the door,
there was a gallery of--
of all these children's work
and these pictures were amazing.
My first thought...
when I walked through that door:
"I'm not good enough to be here.
I'm sure."
And Miss Gravatt sat me down,
she told me about the school,
and you remember Miss Gravatt?
She was very businesslike.
But also very warm.
She was intimidating,
but palpably kind.
She was a paradox
of a human being.
She gave me a date
for an audition.
My mother said, "Okay, Dave,
it's on you." Now...
Those of you who know me...
know that I didn't prepare
for that audition.
That audition was like a-- a possession,
it was just something
that I was proud to have.
But as the days got closer, I'm like,
"Oh, my God, I gotta get--
I gotta get something together." I didn't
even know how to do an audition,
And I had never done it before, so I went
and I said-- I said, "What do I need?"
They said, "A monologue," I...
So I looked up "monologue."
And I went to the library,
the MLK Library, this huge library,
so I gotta find something,
and I found a piece
in one of those yellow script books,
it was a monologue by Mark Twain
called "The Judge's Spirited Woman."
And I learned it in a night.
You know, it was not hard
for me to memorize things.
The next day, it was a Saturday, I think,
and I came to the school,
and they auditioned in what used
to be this room-- the original...
theater, Duke Ellington School
of the Arts.
And all the department heads sat in here,
and the light's in your eyes,
and there's a bunch of kids who already
go to the school, who come on Saturday,
just to see...
who might be coming.
And I talked to all these kids before
I went in, and these kids
were nothing like the kids at Eastern.
They were like them, but they were
different, they were weird,
funny, and self-deprecating,
things like this.
And I remember
I came out on stage...
and I did my audition,
and it was like...
like, terrible.
I-- I froze up in the beginning,
I started, and then I said,
"Wait a minute, I'm messing up,
I'm gonna start again." [sighs]
And I was nervous, and I was scared,
and... and...
in the middle of the audition,
I'm in the middle of the monologue,
uh, one of the teachers, Fred Lee,
he said-- Fred Lee, he goes,
"Okay, that's enough."
I said, "Well, there's still a little
more," he goes, "No, no, no, no, no...
That is enough," he said.
And I-- I can't tell you,
like, I-- I was crushed.
Uh... without saying his disapproval,
I knew it stunk.
And I was right.
When I walked in here, I knew
I wasn't good enough
to go to this school.
And I thought to myself, "Ah, f*ck
this school, that's stupid anyway."
In first-year theater, there's a question
that they ask students from time to time.
And it's a make-or-break question, and...
And we ask this question,
you don't know.
And the question is this:
They say, "Why do you wanna act?"
Now...
if you say anything like,
"I wanna be a star,"
you're not...
You're not gonna get in.
I didn't know that.
And I figured I already blew the audition,
so I told them the truth.
He said, "Why do you wanna act?"
"I don't."
That's what I said.
And they said, "Well then,
why are you here?"
I said, "Because I wanna be a comedian and
some comedian told me that if I wanna be
a good comedian,
I need to learn how to act."
And the teachers look
at each other and go,
"Thank you very much," and I left.
And I was walking down the hallway
kicking rocks.
It was a kid that already went here,
his name was Ako Handy.
And Ako said, "Hey, man, I listened
to them talking about you."
I said, "You did?" He said, "You're in."
I said, "What?" He said, "You're in."
But it didn't make any sense.
Somehow we worked it out so that
they gave me an early enrollment,
and I left Eastern within weeks of that,
and I came to Duke Ellington and it was
better than I could have ever imagined.
I didn't have the suspicion
that most new kids get.
I was an oddity, a new toy, I was quirky,
I wasn't a snappy dresser,
I didn't really know
what the f*ck was going on, because
the cr*ck epidemic itself was new to me
and they were all refugees
from their neighborhood schools.
In the morning,
we would have our academic classes,
and then in the afternoon,
we would have our arts classes.
It was a long school day.
We'd start at 8:30, we wouldn't leave
here 'til five, sometimes 5:30.
Whenever they saw fit.
It's funny walking in here tonight,
'cause I saw the Pride flags up,
and I remember when I came here
all those years ago, it's the first time I
ever met a kid who was just, like, gay.
-It was never strange to us.
-[woman in audience] That's right.
Their sexuality or their gender identity
was the least remarkable thing about
a person that could dance as well
as Roger Bellamy, or...
There was no distinction
between any of that.
Everybody was weird
in their own way.
And in a very strange way, because we
spent so much time with one another.
We helped raise...
one another.
There's a camaraderie
between these students
that I don't know that I've seen since
I left this school.
I can remember, and I won't say names,
there was a student that went here
that used to sell dr*gs.
It wasn't just a student,
but this particular guy...
This particular guy did the cardinal no-no
on the streets. He did what they call
"not making your roll," which meant he
got some dr*gs on consignment
and he didn't pay whoever
gave him the dr*gs back.
And whoever gave him those dr*gs
had declared,
"I'm gonna come to that school,
and I'm gonna k*ll you," he said.
And my man was scared,
and word got around,
around school,
that the g*ons was coming.
And by the time the g*ons showed up,
every dude that went to this school:
gay, straight, whatever the f*ck,
was all standing out front, they say,
"You'll have to k*ll all of us."
And who was in front of all of 'em?
Roger Bellamy with some
leg warmers on like this.
I started making friends that are still
my friends to this very day.
Life-long friends.
As I get older, I appreciate my teachers
more and more.
But to tell you the truth,
I appreciated them then.
Teacher salaries, you know,
not necessarily what it should be.
And when I think about that,
juxtaposed to the dedication
that the teachers, the time they would
spend with me, the way they would notice,
"Are you okay? Is everything all right?
You look sad today."
Any little thing,
like a family member would.
And they fostered an environment
of almost absolute trust,
like your parents.
There's two lectures that I got at school
that changed the way I do comedy.
That like...
turned the light switch on.
It was two teachers:
Donal Leace.
Donal Leace, may he rest in peace.
Maybe one of the single best educators
that I've ever met in my life.
He had a demeanor about himself that
demanded excellence from his students.
He would tell us incredible stories
that I didn't believe. He claimed...
in one class, the song "k*lling
Him Softly" was about him.
I was like, "Nah, n*gga, not you."
He told me he knew Donny Hathaway
and Roberta Flack and all these people.
These D.C. legends.
He's a humble man, but he really
demanded excellence.
And he gave us a lecture once
on a concept called polarization.
Polarization meaning the--
the idea that
if you can make everybody
look at the same thing
at the same time, that their
rational mind will decrease,
and their emotional response
will increase.
He said, "That's how audiences work,
that's how mobs work,
that's how you make a person lose
themself in the crowd."
I got it.
As he was saying this, he would hold
a stapler in his hand,
it was a good lecture. He said,
"Everyone focus on the stapler,"
and he would explain to us
what polarization is
as we're all looking at this stapler,
and then he'd scream, "Hah!"
And everyone would jump, "Oh!"
He said, "What're you scared of?"
"Oh, sh*t, that works."
And ever since he did that lecture,
I listened in his class intently.
He was one of the only guys that I would
always get straight As from
because I worked very hard, not to get his
approval, but to avoid his disapproval.
When we were coming up,
they had a thing called juries.
I don't know, do they still do juries?
Juries is when all the department heads
give you a piece to work on,
and they sit there, and they make you
perform the piece,
and the criticism is brutal.
And we were kids.
We didn't understand that they were
preparing us for a hard world ahead
if you wanted a profession in art.
They would tear us to shreds.
Just the stress...
The stress of a jury.
And man, I never practiced.
'Cause I didn't wanna act.
At an improv class, a teacher named
Geraldine Gillstrap told me
that she should-- I should
stop doing funny pieces.
That I should try to stretch
myself artistically.
And maybe had more in me than comedy.
And at the time, I took offense to that.
So because she said that,
after school that very night,
I went to the comedy club,
and for the first time I signed the list,
and I waited, and I got on,
and I k*lled it.
k*lled it.
Must have been 35 years ago,
night after night, I k*lled it.
I'd show up with the bag of tricks
that I learned at school,
and I would dominate adults
on a regular basis.
Couldn't wait to get out of D.C.
When I was 17,
I moved to New York
and lit that comedy scene up.
I was obviously talented. You'll hear
stories about people saying
that I discovered Dave Chappelle. That's
like saying you discovered sunshine.
I was shining on everybody.
And when I got in that professional world,
I was oddly prepared.
I had a sense of professionalism,
I showed up on time,
I did the things that I learned in school
to do. Just the basics.
My... career didn't have any direction
'cause I was still so young.
And that didn't change for many years.
It didn't change until, uh...
my girlfriend at the time, now my wife,
told me she was pregnant,
and I was like, "You know what? I should
really start taking this seriously."
And when she told me that, before the baby
was born, I'd done my first HBO special,
and then-- and then I went to work on
a sketch comedy show idea I had, and--
and-- and The Chappelle Show came out
when my son was still
maybe 18 months-year old.
And I bet on myself.
I took less money. I took less money,
I remember that,
so I could do what I wanted to do.
I said, "You don't have to pay me
that much, but you can't ever tell me...
You can't ever tell me that I can't do
what I wanna do."
And I did the first season,
I'll tell you, for $300,000.
Which sounds like a lot of money,
but-- but-- but-- but-- but...
It was a rare experience in my life,
because it was the first time
that I did something
that was so successful
that I knew I had exceeded
the expectations.
I was more successful
than I felt like I was supposed to be.
They didn't plan on that.
The second season...
came out, and it was a juggernaut,
and-- and-- and...
and then, I remember this was
the single best day of my career,
the Rick James episode of Chappelle Show
had come out...
People were going crazy about
the Rick James episode at the same time
the-- the DVD for Season 1 of Chappelle
Show dropped. It was the first time any
television show had ever
been sold off air.
And it sold a million copies
in the first day. It was unheard of.
To this day, nothing has sold more
than Chappelle Show.
It's still on the Top Ten in Netflix.
All those great things happened,
and my contract was up.
Clearly...
Clearly, I was about to be rich.
I'll spare you all the details
of why it didn't work out.
But it didn't work out.
And I ended up doing something that no one
had ever seen before, including myself.
Maybe Prince is the only other guy
that I've seen do this,
where you just quit something that was
popular when you're at the very top of it.
Lucky for me, when I quit,
I went to Africa,
so there was a media storm
that I didn't hear.
By the time I got back, everyone
was just lookin' at me crazy.
That was a very difficult
decision to make.
The entire world told me I was crazy,
but I-- I was sure...
I was sure I was being true to myself and
to something that I learned at Ellington.
I'm one of those comedians
that thought of himself as an artist.
I was enamored by what the genre could do.
It was like... the pictures
that I could paint with words, and
the way I could engage with audiences.
I understood as it was happening,
I was very lucky to be able to do this.
And I protected that.
And I knew that if I took the money,
they would expect me
to behave differently,
and I wasn't willing to accept that,
so I quit.
And when I quit, it was a very difficult
time in my life,
that I'll spare you the details, but man,
f*ck show business. It was tough.
And then one day I was
in Panama City, Panama,
and I was in a hotel,
and I looked at the lobby, there was
a-- a painting of Abraham Lincoln.
Was-- And then-- I would look closer,
it wasn't a painting, it was all pennies,
just pennies on a black canvas,
arranged into the face of Abraham Lincoln.
And I asked the guy, I said,
"How much is that painting worth?"
He said, "$600,000, sir."
And I looked at the pennies
that made up the painting,
and I was like,
"That's like, $300 worth of pennies."
Lightbulb went in my head.
I realized the value of art.
Some of the biggest wars and crimes
and scandals in history
were financed through the theft of art.
Art is a powerful commodity.
An artist, if you're good at it,
should never behave as a commodity.
It's a tough one.
And then I gave up.
'Cause it-- I said, "Oh--
you know, this is probably it."
I accepted the fact that the career
I thought I was gonna have was over, but,
I started to rediscover just my art
for its own sake.
I would go to comedy clubs and I'd work
for way less money than I ever had,
and I enjoyed it more
than any of the work I ever did.
It was probably the best work
I'll ever do.
'Cause it was so honest.
It was so sincere.
There was no media,
there was no studio,
there was no scrutiny,
just me and the crowds. And I did it
night after night, and slowly but surely
the crowds got bigger and bigger, and then
suddenly people started to notice.
In post, I would say, "Dave Chappelle
has the tour of the year."
And again, and then the year after that,
and then the year after that.
And then,
Lorne Michaels
asked me to do Saturday Night Live.
And it wasn't just like he asked me,
he was courtin' me, I didn't even know it,
he gave me this whole long speech,
and I was like, "All right." And then
I read some book about Lorne Michaels
starting Saturday Night Live, and I read
the speech that he gave Richard Pryor
when he wanted him to host the show,
and I said, "Holy sh*t,
that's the same sh*t he said to me!"
And I did it.
And that was an enormous amount
of pressure, it had been 12 years
since I'd been on television,
or since I'd even talked to the media,
and I remember I signed my Netflix
contract on my way to my mark
for the monologue. If you do live
television, they count down every second,
"30 seconds..."
"Are you sure this contract is good?"
"It's good, just sign the papers..."
"22 seconds..."
"Aw, n*gga, you better not
be trickin' me."
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one,
I walked out on that stage,
and I k*lled it.
It was natural. It was nothing.
It was easy work.
Got an Emmy for that one, too.
First Emmy I won.
And when I walked on the stage
after being in the cold for so long,
for the first time when I walked
on the stage, I'm like,
"Damn, n*gga, I just made
That's what I thought to myself.
It's been great ever since.
And really I could do these specials like
Steph Curry, I be sh**ting from inside,
outside, all night.
It's been great ever since.
A lot of my friends are athletes,
and I never could understand
what it would feel like
to only have a limited amount of time to
be great. You got 20 years to be the best,
or 30 years to be the best,
but when you do art, you could be great
whenever the will decides
that you're great.
And I feel very lucky for that.
And I never forgot this school.
I've always come back,
checked in. One of my favorite honors
was doing the commencement at Ellington.
Listen, I can't even remember
what year it is.
I just remember they cheered for me
when I came out, I wasn't a big star,
but I was their star,
and I felt like I was home.
After I did Lorne Michaels,
I mean, after I did Saturday Night Live,
Lorne Michaels said something that
I gotta share with you. He goes,
"You went to Peggy Cafritz's school,
didn't you?" That's what he said.
I said, "I did," and he said... he said--
I wanted to say this on
Saturday Night Live. He goes,
"Tell her I owe her money."
You know,
I never asked
to have this theater named after me.
Peggy asked me.
She was ailing, and I went
to her house to visit her.
And she said, "I want you to put your name
on the school," she said,
"It would help us raise money
for the school," and to me, it was like,
I felt like I'm a little young for that,
and I'm still kind of using the name,
you know what I mean?
Let's see what I do with it first!
You never know...
Like, imagine if O.J. had named
his son O.J. Junior.
"Oh, Dad!"
And around then, I was receiving
the Mark Twain Prize. Huge honor...
-And...
-[audience applauds]
And the next day, all the artists
that came to honor me,
the Bradley Coopers and Chris Tuckers,
and all these great people who
came to Ellington and they taught
master classes for the students.
And Peggy Cooper Cafritz,
as sick as she was,
got out of her bed,
so she could be with her babies.
She never left us.
So I did it. So, you know, whatever you
wanna do, if I can help,
I'll do it.
Now I have to tell you:
if you quit a show like Chappelle Show,
I don't know if you know what
happens to you professionally,
but I'll tell you what doesn't happen.
They don't just say,
"Well, good luck
in your future endeavors."
With that media, they b*at me up.
With their power,
they tried to make me behave, it's--
-it-- it takes a strong person...
-[audience member] Yeah.
...to stand out in the cold like that,
and I swear to God,
so much of the strength I got to do that,
the inner warmth I got to do that,
I learned in this school,
and from my friends
who helped raise me.
So why wouldn't...
I'd do anything I could
to help my benefactor.
And the last time I came back,
after The Closer,
when the kids were mad at me,
I got to tell you,
that was quite the day.
All the kids was screaming and yelling,
I remember, I said to the kids, I go,
"Well, okay, well what do you guys
think I did wrong?"
And a line formed.
These kids said everything about gender,
and this and that and the other,
but they didn't say anything about art.
And this is my biggest gripe
with this whole controversy with
The Closer: that you cannot report
on an artist's work, and remove
artistic nuance from his words.
It would be like if you were reading
a newspaper and they say,
"Man sh*t in the Face by a Six-Foot Rabbit
Expected to Survive," you'd be like
"Oh, my God," and they never tell you
it's a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
I took a lot of cold sh*ts...
in show business.
And I gotta tell you, as the years go on,
you feel the sh*ts less and less.
"Ah, it's just the business,"
is what you say.
But that one, that day,
boy, that day they hurt me.
When I heard those talking points
coming out of these children's faces,
that really, sincerely, hurt me.
Because I know those kids didn't
come up with those words,
I've heard those words before.
The more you say I can't say something,
the more urgent it is for me to say it.
And it has nothing to do
with what you're saying I can't say.
It has everything to do with my right,
my freedom...
of artistic expression.
That is valuable to me.
That is not separate from me.
It's worth protecting for me,
and it's
worth protecting for everyone else
who endeavors in our noble,
noble professions.
And these kids...
And these kids didn't understand
that they were instruments...
instruments of oppression.
And I didn't get mad at them.
They're kids. They're freshmen.
They're not ready yet.
They don't know.
What made me mad...
and I am this petty...
I ain't sayin' names.
One of the kid's mother went on Fox News,
and she used to be a student here,
I remember her face
but I don't know if she was
particularly popular. Anyway.
She was in
the Literary Media Arts department.
She said a lot of things
that I didn't like, lot of things.
But, you know, that's her right.
The thing she said that got to me,
she said, "At Duke Ellington, that theater
was a sanctuary for students.
I used to sit there and meditate."
Well, of course you'd meditate.
You were a Literary Media Arts student.
We didn't meditate in here.
We got to work. But, okay, fine.
"I would sit in there and meditate,"
she said.
And then she scrunched her face up.
She's a beautiful woman,
but her face looked hideous,
the way she scrunched it up,
and she said, "And just to imagine...
his name...
on that theater.
How could you do that to those kids?"
Listen.
No matter what they said
about The Closer,
it was still the most-watched
special in the world.
And I am still of the mind,
and I say this with all humility,
it is a masterpiece, and I challenge
all my p-- my peers-- to make its equal.
They cannot. I am sure.
It will be decades before you ever see
someone in my genre
as proficient as me.
I am maybe a once-in-a-lifetime talent.
I am telling you the truth.
About three weeks ago I saw
in the newspaper that a man,
they said a man that was dressed
in women's clothing,
threw a-- a pie at the Mona Lisa
and tried to deface it.
And-- and it made me laugh,
'cause I'm like, "It's like The Closer."
I said it to the kids that day: if you
have a better idea, then express it.
And you can b*at me. It's that easy.
If you have more talent than me,
then display it and you can b*at me
with certainty.
This is what our genre is about.
The idea that my name will be turned into
a-- a-- a instrument of someone else's
perceived oppression
is untenable to me.
The fact that if my name was
on this theater, and a kid
that walked through that door would feel
anything other than pride in his school
and in their endeavors,
that's untenable to me.
So on Friday, I decided...
that I don't want my name on the school.
Hear me out.
The Ellington family is my family.
When this controversy came out,
and students were angry,
at the height of their anger,
they said, "We still wanna name
the theater after you."
They taught the kids about the nuance
of art and activism.
And to-- I feel a great deal of success,
and it came around.
So it's not that they did not wanna give
this to me, they're still my family.
And, I'm not gonna say I don't want it.
I'm gonna say I'll defer it.
Rather than give this theater my name,
I would like to give these students
my message.
To them.
So it is with great honor, that I unveil
the new name of this theater,
the Jerrod Carmichael Theater.
I'm just kidding, I'm just kiddin'...
I'm just kiddin'.
I'm totally joking.
Uh, let me see if I can get this here.
This theater should be called...
The Theater
for Artistic Freedom and Expression.
I want that for myself,
and I want it for every student
that's educated at this school.
And when and if you are ever ready,
you can put my name right on top of that.
I love you, Duke Ellington, thank you
very much. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
{\an8}Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure
to bring off his new album Leace Renewed,
the first single "Flow to You,"
give it up for the best-hitter
history teacher in the world, Mr. Leace.
[laughter from class]
[Mr. Leace and students singing]
[students begin clapping]
Come on! Here we go.
[all clapping]
That's the show!
I'll see you next year!
-[whispering] b*tches.
-[all laugh]
[announcer] This is protected by the red,
the black, and the green
at the crossroad with a key!