Dave Chappelle checks himself into mental health facility!

Coooooooold blooooooooded...

maybe he's been up to that.

"WELL, we're movin' on UP...."

I gonna go ahead and guess he's not in a white hospital in South Africa. I've been wrong before. Don't quote me or anything.

He's one of the best comedians out there, even if he's not 100% all the time.

"I'm so sorry," says Dave Chappelle, chuckling as he shakes hands with a visiting journalist. "This is a terrible way to meet a person." It is late afternoon and Chappelle has a long night of work ahead, so the introduction is a bit rushed. But more than likely, he's referring to the fact that he's covered in blackface, with white painted lips, white gloves, a red vest, a black cane and a Pullman Porter cap.
...
Today's scenes are part of a delicately titled sketch, "The N----r Pixie," in which Chappelle plays a cackling, devil-on-the-shoulder creation who serves as the self-hating conscience of famous black men, such as Tiger Woods and Chappelle himself. Hence the racially combustible costume. In Chappelle's universe, this is high comedy -- the kind of brazen stunt that has become his show's calling card. As he heads back for another take, he flashes the journalist a giant grin: "Bet you never met a real live coon before!"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773670/site/newsweek/

Dave, I'd like to tell you you're my hero, but I'm white, so I guess I'll stick with Larry David.

"I might get bit!"

I gonna go ahead and guess he's not in a white hospital in South Africa

there's no apartheid in South Africa any more, people

Exactly. So it's not like Chapelle is going to some crrrraaaaaazy white people place.

I imagine South Africa would be for privacy and to avoid papparazzi?

Oh, I'm sorry, did you mean there isn't still segregation in South Africa, so that there are no "white" and "black" facilities? Get real.

Maybe he wants to get some fat raw diamonds. He's rich, bitch.

May you be haunted by voices in your head.

uhh, I thought he has been a practicing muslim for a while, doubtful he's a nation of islam follower given his main writer is white and frequently appears on howard stern.

http://www.davidlachapelle.com/images/books.jpg

In South Africa, TIME's Simon Robinson talks with the comic about his sudden disappearance from Chappelle's Show

Posted Sunday, May. 15, 2005

Dave Chappelle shows up to our interview in a red t-shirt, blue jeans and shiny white sneakers. He lopes around in his usual style, pacing a lot, but does not seem like a man struggling to speak or to order his thoughts at all. He's lucid and thoughtful and a couple of times asks me to give him some time to think about answers. He concedes that he is dealing with a lot of issues and mentions that he had consulted a psychiatrist about a week ago for a forty minute session. He is also quite fastidious about keeping his new sneakers clean and stops at least twice to wipe smudges off their toes.

The first thing Chappelle wants is to dispel rumors—that he's got a drug problem, that he's checked into a mental institution in Durban—that have been flying around the U.S. for the past week. He says he is staying with a friend, Salim Domar, and not in a mental institution, as has been widely reported in America. Chappelle says he is in South Africa to find "a quiet place" for a while. "Let me tell you the things I can do here which I can't at home: think, eat, sleep, laugh. I'm an introspective dude. I enjoy my own thoughts sometimes. And I've been doing a lot of thinking here."

The picture he paints—and it seems a fairly honest and frank assessment— is of someone struggling to come to terms with a new position and power who's still figuring out how to come to grips with how people around him are reacting to the $50 million deal he signed last year with Comedy Central. Without naming specific characters, he seems to blame both some of his inner circle (not his family) and himself for the stresses created by last year's deal.

"There were things that overwhelmed me," he says. "But not in the way that people are saying. I haven't spent any of the money. All that stuff about partying and taking crack is not true. Why do I live on a farm in Ohio? To support my partying lifestyle?"

The problems, he says, started with his inner circle."If you don't have the right people around you and you're moving at a million miles an hour you can lose yourself," he says. "Everyone around me says, 'You're a genius!'; 'You're great!'; 'That's your voice!' But I'm not sure that they're right." And he stresses that Comedy Central was not part of the problem and put no more than normal television restrictions on what he could do.

"You got to be careful of the company you keep," Chappelle says. "It's hard to know how much to say. One of the things that happens when people make the leap from a certain amount of money to tens of millions of dollars is that the people around you dramatically change.

"During my ascent, I've seen other people go through that wall to become really big. They always said that fame didn't change them but that it changes the people around them. You always hear that but you never really understand it. But now that I'm there that makes a lot of sense and I'm learning what that means. You have to have people around you that you can trust and aren't just out for a meal ticket."

The breakdown in trust within his inner circle seems to have led him to question the material they were producing. He seems obsessed with making sure the material is good and honest and something that he will be proud. "I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling," he says. "What ever decisions I make right now I'm going to have live with. Your soul is priceless." The first two seasons of his show "had a real spirit to them," he says. "I want to make sure whatever I do has spirit."

But Chappelle also says that he must share the blame for the stalled third season. "I'm admittedly a human being," he says. "I'm a difficult kind of dude." His earlier walkout during shooting "had a little psychological element to it. I have trust issues, things like that. I saw some stuff in myself that I just didn't dig. It's like when I brought a girl home to my mom and it looked as if my mom really didn't like this girl. And she told me, 'I like her just fine. I just don't like you around her.' That's how I feel in this situation. There were some things about myself that I didn't like. People got to take inventory from time to time. That's what this [coming to South Africa] is for."

This is Chappelle's second trip to South Africa. He first came to Durban, and visited Salim, in 2000. Chappelle won't tell me exactly how he met Salim but describes him as a family friend. A soft-spoken Muslim, Salim seems also to be something of a sounding board to Chappelle, who converted to Islam several years ago. While Chappelle is not doing a formal religious course in Durban, says Salim, who wore a simple cotton robe and hung back through the interview and photo shoot and only spoke when I asked him a question, "if he wants to talk religion then I'm there as someone to talk to." Says Chappelle: "This is kind of my spot where I can come to fill my spirit back up. Sometimes you neglect these things if you are running on a corporate schedule." The crux of his crisis seems to boil down to his almost obsessive need to "check my intentions." He uses the phrase a few times during the interview and explains that it means really making sure that he's doing what he's doing for the right reasons.

His family, he says, has been a huge support over the past eight months. "They've been phenomenal really, just incredible. What beautiful people. Everyone loves their family but it's good if you can like them too."

His religion is also crucial. "I don't normally talk about my religion publicly because I don't want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is a beautiful religion if you learn it the right way. It's a lifelong effort. Your religion is your standard. Coming here I don't have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I'm interested in the kind of person I've got to become. I want to be well rounded and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I've got to check my intentions, man."

That includes planning for the future. When I ask him if he would ever buy a place of his own in South Africa, Chappelle replies, "First of all I've got to make sure I've got a job."

He says that he's only been recognized five or six times in the two weeks he's been here. "It happens so sporadically that when it does it freaks me out because I have to remember, 'Oh, yeah, I'm famous.'" At the end of our interview/photo shoot an American woman does recognize him. "Number seven," he cries. "Wow, I'm not that big in Africa. I've got to do an action film here."

During most of the hour and a half that we talk, Chappelle is serious and introspective. But he still has his sense of humor, which comes out as we near the end of our conversation: "Is that enough to prove I'm not smoking crack or hanging out in a mental institution?"

I always knew the "mental health" thing was a crock. One person, one time says something like "Dave's going to go get his head together, I don't know when he'll be back" turns into "rehab" after the Chinese whispers are done.

You say "awesome," I say "predictable."

are there any songs about it sucking to be rich, aside from 'imagine'? is it not possible that it may, in fact, suck to be rich? and if so, should people not be allowed to suggest this?

I think what Shakey's trying to say is to not be ambitious or creative unless you can handle the attention.

To his credit, Dave's heart definitely is in the right place, and I have a ton of respect for him. But when he says that at 14 he wanted to be as rich and famous (and, I assume, as funny) as Bill Cosby - did he not advance beyond that naive conception of what it means to actually BE someone like Bill Cosby...?

I'm just saying I woulda thought he'd have grown and gained some adult perspective since then. How can anyone think $50 million isn't going to massively affect their personal and professional life is beyond me.

that's true - and y'know, good for him. I hope he comes through it okay. He's still funny, and he totally seems like an upstanding dude. I hope he doesn't become "that tragic figure" he referred to in the Lipton interview.

After the release of "Albatross" and consequent rise in fame, Green struggled spiritually with the band's success and being in the spotlight. While touring Europe, after a gig in Munich, Germany, the band was invited into the country, and Peter went on a 3 day LSD trip. In his own words, he "went on a trip, and never came back". He quit Fleetwood Mac in 1970, declaring money to be evil and giving it away to charity. He recorded a meandering and unfocused album "The End of the Game" and faded into obsurity, getting a job at a graveyard cutting the grass.

Wha?

obligatory "cocaine's a hell of a drug" joke goes here

Oh dear. :-( Dave.

kinda weird watchin Neil Brennan's Comedy Central standup special, he and Chappelle have a lot of the same diction/mannerisms. really v funny for the most part, too bad about the last quarter being totally misogynistic. he's better w the race stuff.

guy seems super gross

Having not seen him do stand up before, what do you mean? He's performing in the UK and Ireland in this month and I was thinking of going to see him.