Chappelle Charms Full House at Bridges
By Cory Forsyth
A&F Associate

Dave Chappelle's humor certainly appeals to stand-up comedy's lowest common denominator: repeated vulgarity. That said, the crowd loved it. Scores of ready-to-laugh college students, some of whom had been waiting for almost two hours, packed Big Bridges Auditorium in a little over half an hour last Friday night in eager anticipation of Dave Chappelle. And laugh they did. They laughed, shrieked, tittered, giggled and blushed—guffawing and fist-pumping, too.

Chappelle's opener, comedian Greer Barnes, was similar in style. My notes for his warm-up act read like Laura Bush's list of complaints about the recording industry: "references to marijuana, reference to anal sex, and explicit references to doggie-style sex." He then filled out his five minutes with a joke about being caught smoking weed by a cop on a horse and some impressions.

Chappelle then came on stage to a standing ovation, looking very relaxed and happy to be on the campus. I got the feeling that he was happy to be able to cut loose in front of such a permissive college audience instead of censoring himself for his television appearances. I can't imagine that a national telecast, where Chappelle's penchant for the word "motherfucker" is censored, is quite the same for him.

For about an hour, Chappelle entertained the crowd with jokes about the state of the nation (he's anti-war), a lot of jokes about race relations, an extended monologue about cunnilingus, and more. Asked what he thought of the show later, Chappelle said, "The crowd was off the hook." He added that "The theater was beautiful, and I felt a love vibe in the room."

Many loved the show. For my part, I spent a fair amount of time wondering about the sexual lives of a pair of girls a few rows ahead of me who were especially—and by especially I mean earsplitting, as in earsplitting shrieking—enthusiastic about Chappelle's oral sex humor. Apparently such unexpected enthusiasm was occuring in other parts of the theater as well. An anonymous student told me that Dean Quinley was also laughing uproariously during some of the dirtier parts of Chappelle's schtick. The student said, "It made me uncomfortable. She was out-laughing me on the vulgar stuff."

Watching the show made real for me my fear that I can never be a succesful stand-up comedian. I don't have, and cannot do, a "voice." Chappelle, on the other hand, has a great "voice." He just sounds funny. You'd laugh if he read you the Wall Street Journal. He also did some pretty good impressions, notably a white police officer voice that brought consistent laughs.

While I spoke to very few students who had seen the show that weren't well-satisfied that they had received their money's worth, some were not all that impressed. Chappelle was hilarious, but his brand of comedy seemed fairly unoriginal. As I said earlier, his jokes were mostly of the appealing-to-the-lowest-common-denominator variety, and there was very little improvised comedy; during the hour he spent onstage he never significantly strayed from what seemed a scripted comedy show. Having said that, however, I'll confess that I still laughed my ass off.

Chappelle, who wrote and starred in the movie Half-Baked (1998), has appeared in nearly a dozen movies before and since, the most recent being Undercover Brother (2002). If you loved the show and want more, or if you want to know what you missed out on, check out Chappelle's new show on Comedy Central, which airs Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m.