Dave Chappelle Lights Up the Kennedy Center as the 22nd Recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
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Image courtesy The Kennedy Center/Tracey Salazar; all other photos courtesy of the Kennedy Center
This past weekend, the 22nd annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor was awarded to stand-up and sketch comic Dave Chappelle.
Demand for tickets to the ceremony were, according to David Rubenstein, Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, greater than anything the Mark Twain Prize has experienced over the course of the last two plus decades—this despite the fact, he joked, “that our hometown comedic prodigy actually now lives on a farm in Ohio.” So many of Chappelle’s friends and colleagues came out to support him that they overflowed orchestra boxes on both sides of the theater. Chappelle, himself, was so touched by the honor that he returned to the red carpet after his initial slip-through-the-back arrival and stopped to talk to everyone, up to and including those of us (Paste included) stationed in the lowly, unlit online press pen at the end of the line, where he lingered so long answering questions we all missed Morgan Freeman emceeing the official start of the ceremony.
Morgan Freeman, in the dramatic spotlight his reputation deserves. Image courtesy The Kennedy Center/Tracey Salazar
All good things having limits, the show’s handlers did eventually force the issue, and after taking one last minute to answer a final question for the reporter from his hometown newspaper, Chappelle was officially whisked away. As the star of the night, he, of course, was ushered into his box seat in plenty of time to catch his local performing arts high school alma mater’s Radical Elite Show Band perform a raucous, dance-filled rendition of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” As for the rest of us, we were left to race down the Hall of Nations to avoid being locked out of the ceremony entirely—and even then, we ended up having to linger outside the theater’s doors until the night’s first video package could give our late entrance some cover.
Duke Ellington High School’s Radical Elite Show Band performs “Let’s Go Crazy.” Image courtesy The Kennedy Center/Tracey Salazar
We will have more to say both about the substance of the ceremony and the scope of Chappelle’s comedic legacy when the special finally makes its way to local PBS stations this coming January. For those desperate to know, however, if any part of the evening addressed the generational tensions between Chappelle’s most recent Netflix specials and the evolution in what transgressive, boundary-pushing stand-up material looks like now, more than a decade after Chappelle first took a sabbatical from life as a public and comedic figure, the answer, on the whole, is no. At the same time, at least for anyone at home in specific corners of Extremely Online Comedy Discourse, the same factors that will lead the average viewer to that no will instead produce an answer that is very much yes. The entire evening, really, played like some kind of comedy culture hologram, sincere celebration when angled one way, knowing winks at a certain slice of comedy fans when angled another.
Here’s what I mean: The rogues’ gallery of celebrity guests officially announced before the day of the ceremony included Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Neal Brennan, Common, Bradley Cooper, Morgan Freeman, Tiffany Haddish, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Lorne Michaels, Trevor Noah, Q-Tip, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart and Frédéric Yonnet. Once we got into formation in the red carpet press pen, however, we learned that Tiegen and Noah would not be in attendance, but that, as surprise last-minute additions, Erykah Badu, Kenan Thompson, Michael Che, Colin Jost and Aziz Ansari would.
