The Most Important Thing Dave Chappelle Ever Did Was Walk Away

Editor’s note: This article is a response to K. Austin Collins’s review “Who Is Black Comedy For?,” which focused on Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy From Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms, an excerpt of which you can read here.

My book Black Out Loud started, like most books do, with a feeling I couldn’t shake—one that took hold when In Living Color first aired in the early 1990s and that, as I’ve written previously, only deepened. K. Austin Collins reviewed my book, which traces that history from vaudeville forward, and I’ve been sitting with his take. He’s a serious critic, and the review deserves an honest conversation. Let me start with what he got right.

Collins argues that because I ended my book with Chappelle’s Show and framed the entire history of Black comedy as a march toward crossover fearlessness, I left out something essential: the comedy that never wanted to cross over at all. Def Comedy Jam. BET’s ComicView. Paul Mooney. Patrice O’Neal. Katt Williams. Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, which quietly became the longest-running Black sitcom in television history while most of the critical establishment wasn’t paying attention. These are real omissions, and I want to be straight with you about that: Every book has a frame, and frames always cost you something. What mine cost me was the full weight of Black comedy that thrived entirely on its own terms, answerable only to Black audiences and no one else.

But here’s where I’d push back—and I want to do it carefully, because Collins is making a subtler argument than it might first appear. He writes that I err in “holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement.” And he frames the choice to dwell on 1990s network sitcoms as a choice to gauge Black comedy’s progress “in terms that are not always those of Black comedians themselves.” That’s a serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer.

First, the factual question: Does the book actually hold up the crossover era as an apex? I don’t think it does. And it certainly wasn’t what I intended. My chapter on Family Matters includes the story of when Jaleel White, the actor who played Steve Urkel on the show, sits in a UCLA lecture hall and hears a teaching assistant call him a modern-day Sambo. White didn’t argue back, he said in his own memoir, because he felt he couldn’t entirely dismiss the critique. My Living Single chapter ends with Erika Alexander describing what happened after that show was canceled: no development deals waiting, no industry safety net, just “back to pilot season”—as if five seasons of a top-rated show had never happened. The book doesn’t read those moments as proof that the American experiment worked. It reads them as evidence of how contingent the whole thing always was.

But Collins’s deeper point isn’t really about whether I celebrate the ’90s uncritically. It’s about the frame itself—about what it means to use network television as your primary lens at all. When Collins writes that “the promise has always been contingent—you can tell jokes about race, but …,” he is identifying something that runs through the entire history I tried to tell. The ellipsis is doing real work there. You can tell jokes about race, but not if they make white audiences too uncomfortable. You can have your own show, but not if it doesn’t appeal to white viewers. You can be Richard Pryor, but only if you eventually show up in buddy comedies with Gene Wilder. The condition attached to Black visibility in mainstream American entertainment has almost never been lifted entirely. It’s just been renegotiated, generation by generation, at significant personal, artistic, and cultural cost.

Collins is right that I tell that story mostly from inside those negotiations. What I’m less willing to concede is his implication that telling it from inside is the same as endorsing the terms of the deal. Consider what the book actually shows about the ’90s-sitcom era. Living Single was built by a 27-year-old Black woman who had to fight her network to keep a central character they found “too strong.” A Different World was transformed into something vital and resonant only after a Black woman, Debbie Allen, seized creative control of it and refused to let NBC flatten it back into safer territory. In Living Color existed as long as Keenen Wayans could hold Fox at arm’s length—and when he couldn’t, he walked. These are not stories about the American experiment succeeding. They are stories about Black artists extracting space from institutions that were always trying to take it back.

The real disagreement between Collins and me, I think, is about whether those extractions matter—whether they belong in the center of a history of Black comedic achievement or whether centering them concedes too much to the institutions agnostic to that achievement (though happy to profit off of it). Collins believes, or at least implies, that the more radical tradition is the one that never bothered negotiating with those institutions at all—that the real fearlessness is in the work that was never asking for a seat at the table. I have deep respect for that argument. I’ve watched enough Katt Williams to know it isn’t wrong.

But I keep coming back to something Keenen Wayans said about why he took In Living Color to Fox in the first place. He looked at Saturday Night Live—at what it had done for Eddie Murphy, at what it couldn’t do for Damon Wayans—and he thought: We could do this, on our own terms, for our people, on a platform large enough that it actually changes what’s possible. The goal wasn’t integration for the sake of integration, or to prove anything to white America. But it was, at least in part, to create permission for the comics who would come next, for the future writers and showrunners who were then watching from their dorm rooms and deciding what was possible for them. Yvette Lee Bowser toiled in the writers’ room of A Different World and decided she could create Living Single. Mara Brock Akil watched Living Single and decided she could create Girlfriends. That is not necessarily evidence that the American experiment is working—but it is evidence of Black artists using the proximity to power they’d fought for to build something that mattered to them, even if those creations were temporary.

Collins asks: What if fearlessness has nothing to do with white audiences or gatekeepers? I’d answer: Sometimes it doesn’t. And those comics and that tradition deserve their own full reckoning. But sometimes fearlessness is precisely the willingness to walk into the rooms that were designed to diminish you, take what you need, refuse to be diminished, and leave something behind for the next person who has to walk in after you.

That brings me to Chappelle, where Collins and I diverge most directly. He suggests that Chappelle’s most important contribution might not be the Netflix specials or the Prince sketch but the moment he turned to the camera and said, “This racism is killing me inside!” I’d go further: I think the most important thing Chappelle ever did was walk off the set entirely. Not because he rejected his audience, but because he refused to let the wrong audience define the work. That act of refusal is the direct descendant of every Black comedian I wrote about who chose integrity over the deal. Keenen Wayans leaving In Living Color when Fox moved to control it. Richard Pryor walking offstage in Las Vegas mid-set because he looked out at Dean Martin in the front row and didn’t recognize himself anymore. The willingness to stop is just as much the tradition as trailblazing in the first place.

Collins also invokes Dick Gregory’s late-in-life argument that Black entertainers were burdened by liberation expectations that white male entertainers never had to carry. It’s a powerful point, and Gregory was right. But Gregory himself spent decades making that burden visible—on stages, in marches, and in an autobiography that was anything but safe. The contradiction between what Gregory said and what Gregory did is itself part of the story I was telling: that the tension between public performance and private conviction is baked into this entire tradition, going back to the enslaved people who learned to mask their real feelings behind laughter.

Collins closes by asking what a truly revolutionary history of Black comedy would look like if it centered the comedy that never needed white approval. It’s the right question, and I hope someone writes that book. I mean that seriously. But I’d gently offer this: The fearlessness of the comics who built careers entirely within Black cultural spaces was made possible, in part, by the generations who fought for autonomy inside the mainstream institutions—and won enough of it to loosen the grip for everyone who came after. Those aren’t two separate histories. They’re the same one, told from different vantage points.

Black Out Loud is one vantage point. There are many others. What I’d ask readers—both those who’ve read the book and those who haven’t yet—is to consider whether the story I did tell holds up within the frame I chose. I believe it does. I also believe Collins has identified the limits of that frame, and I’m grateful for that. The comedy that lives beyond that frame deserves its own telling, with the same seriousness and depth. That’s the book I’d read next.