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December 20, 2005
UPDATED: the chappelle conspiracy
Forget the NSA. The sweet, sweet scent of conspiracy is everywhere. (Hat tip, Kem Poston.)
This account of Dave Chappelle's fall from grace has been pieced together by me, a retired public relations executive who wishes to remain anonymous. my contacts, many of whom were closely related to the individuals involved, enabled me to fairly accurately recount the events that took place. You can take this for what you wish, but it is the truth -- the abhorrent byproduct of the industry I used to hold to such a high esteem.[...]Dave was haunted by a secret. One that only he was aware of, and one he couldn't share with anyone, lest his comedy empire crumble.
He knew that at the same time he was signing his record-setting deal, there was a secret cabal of powerful African-American leaders from the business, political, and entertainment industries working together to ensure that the third season of Chappelle's Show would never happen.
And who is this cabal, you ask? Household names, all:
Al Sharpton
Jesse Jackson
Louis Farrakhan
Bill Cosby
Whoopie Goldberg
Oprah Winfrey
Robert L. Johnson
the dark crusaders
Read and be very, very afraid for the future of black creativity.
...
UPDATE 8:30 PM PST - Actually, read but don't get too scared. Or get scared at the thought of money-changers in the temple of the crazyblackgenius crack-up. As it happens, chappelleconspiracy.com was registered just a few months ago by WebLinc LLC, a Philly-based interactive agency whose client list ranges from Urban Outfitters to Crayola.
Registrant:WebLinc, LLC
XXX North XXth Street
Suite 200
Philadelphia, PA 19107
US
Domain Name: CHAPPELLETHEORY.COM
Administrative Contact , Technical Contact : WebLinc, LLC
dns@weblinc.com
WebLinc, LLC
XXX North XXth Street
Suite 200
Philadelphia, PA 19107
US
Phone: 215-XXX-XXXX
Fax: 215-XXX-XXXX
Record expires on 06-Oct-2006
Record created on 06-Oct-2005
Database last updated on 06-Oct-2005
Of course, a registration whois proves bupkis, but it does suggest that rather than having found a brother/sister in the site's imagined creator, I have instead been interpolated as a customer/end-user (BZZT! ZAPP!) for WebLinc's client. (I know, I know; they're not mutually exclusive. My hope for complete fellowship springs eternal nonetheless.) Given that Comedy Central will be airing the episodes Chappelle completed before calling it quits, I'd put even money that chappelletheory.com is a viral ad for the new episodes - that or the kids at WebLinc have some serious spare time on their hands. (Third possibility: Chappelle has another project in the works and needs to creating a meme-hole about leaving Comedy Central in order to accommodate it.)
I don't have much truck with purists who think creativity for hire or in the service of advertising is lesser or tainted creativity. Some of my favorite thin, ephemeral things exist only to market solid things, and some (music videos, for example) completely transcend their origins as shills as far as I'm concerned. (Most times at least. There are a lot of bad videos out there.) Still, there's something "funny peculiar" about how chappelletheory.com (assuming it is an ad. Any sleuths out there with info?) harnesses black paranoia. It brings to mind ad initiatives where a non-black-owned product looked to authorize itself through a marketing tie-in or affiliation with a particular civil rights org or institution. chappelletheory.com is a pothead inversion of the organizational-tie-in gambit, where instead of insinuating itself into a demo via the trojan horse of a guaranteeing black institution, the site's wry, smoked-out expansiveness associates with a specific kind of black alienation. It aims itself directly at the mid-brains of the kind of head that sympathized with Chappelle's defection from celebrity while simultaneously resenting his decision to stop bringing the jokes.
If there's a telling (damning?) contradiction at the heart of chappelletheory, it's the site's foundational notion that Dave might have been undone by the inherent conservatism of the black "old guard." Don't get me wrong; I find Robert L. Johnson as odious as the next black commentator, but the thing is that Dave Chappelle had already long cracked the code of how to say funny, true, fucked up shit to/about black people. That's what his comedy is about in the first place, and its success was so monumental precisely because Whoopie and Bob and Bill held no terrors for him from jump. It was the later, uncannily cohered, national dragon that he was having trouble slaying. After all, in his Time interview Chappelle complains not of black rejection, but of white love, of making white folks laugh a little too hard.
So with all that in mind, why does an ad agency make a joke site about Dave Chappelle where the villains are black folks? More on the money: For which client? There are lots of ways to harness the engines of race consciousness, and for all kinds of reasons - fun, profit, aesthetic effect and so on. None of the possible permutations denies or undoes all the ways that chappelletheory is funny. It's very funny, very well crafted. I just want to know who I'm laughing with and at. Dave was always very up front with us about that; put him and Neil's names in the credits, their salt-pepper mugs in the jokes. It's not much to ask that anyone evoking him and his particular comedic FX do the same.
Posted by ebogjonson in screened, videogames and other cracks, on December 20, 2005 5:42 PM
Comments
nice report.
Posted by: dchill at December 22, 2005 8:08 AM
I read today that Charlie Murphy and a writer for the chappelle show made the site up as ding! ding! ding! you get a cigar! an ad for an upcoming movie the two are writing together.
Posted by: TMJ at December 22, 2005 3:29 PM
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