Well, I have some very bad news for the people in the front rows.
[audience chuckling]
I heard that some of you paid as much as $800 for your tickets.
Sadly, I did this same show a couple weeks ago in Atlanta...
for $60 a head. Can you imagine?
[laughter]
Nigga, you could have flown to Atlanta...
got a hotel, had some dinner,
and came back and you'd still have a little money left over, niggas.
Paid way too much just to see me in this gay-ass neighborhood.
All right, let me roll up my sleeves and tell these pussy jokes.
[Dave chuckling]
Will told me to say there hasn't been this many pussy references
in this room since Cats was here.
[somber piano music playing]
[Dave] And when I think back at it, this was probably the only time my life
that I ever thought to myself, "I should kill everybody at school."
[audience laughs]
Thank you very much, New York.
-Good night. -[cheers and applause]
[cheering continues]
[cheers and applause]
Thank you, guys, very much.
Boy... I got to tell you, man.
I've been doing this set all week, and boy, I'll be telling jokes
and sometimes niggas look like they're in actual pain over the jokes.
Uh, one of it's that bad to me,
but I understand why I could hurt some people's feelings, so tonight...
[whooping, cheering]
[Dave chuckles]
Tonight I'm going to give you an opportunity that I rarely give anybody.
I'm going to let you say whatever it is you need to say to my face.
Or ask me whatever it is you want to know,
but there are no dumb questions allowed.
If you ask a stupid question, you'll be asked to leave.
-[audience laughs] -Just kidding.
No, I'm just kidding, go ahead. Everyone relax. Yes, sir, in the front.
Two questions: How often do you write? And can I have a cigarette?
All right. First, you may have a cigarette,
but remember, this is not jail, motherfucker.
[laughter]
This lady right here.
I have a question. Do you remember this scene?
Uh... [grunts]
[Dave] Oh, I do remember that.
Ma'am, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave. That was a terrible question.
This gentleman in the front with a salmon-colored shirt on.
I was wondering if you had any advice for young comedians
that you generally give, and...?
Are you thinking of doing comedy?
Um...
I've never done it before, but watching you has made me want to try it.
[audience laughing]
[scattered clapping]
[man] Bring him up! Bring him up!
-Bring him up! -I don't know if that's an insult or not.
It's a-- It's a compliment. It's...
I mean, niggas don't say, "I've never done brain surgery,
but it looks a lot easier than I thought."
[audience laughs]
I was...
I'm teasing.
All right, here would be my advice.
Okay, I don't know how comedians start nowadays, right?
But what I would suggest is just start.
And, and, and... once you start, you can't really stop, no matter...
what happens, no matter how bad it gets, no matter what people say.
You know what I mean?
'Cause comedy is weird like that.
You know why I hate watching other comedians do comedy?
Not 'cause I hate other comedians, but because I love comedy so much.
It's like watching somebody else fuck your girl.
[audience laughs]
And I say, "I fuck her better than that."
Yes, you on the aisle up there, the lady with the long...
Yes, you, standing up, I see you.
-What's your favorite book of all time? -[Dave] My favorite book of all time?
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
[cheering]
[audience member whistling]
That guy-- That guy with the baseball hat.
Marry-fuck-kill: Michelle, Rihanna, Oprah?
Wait, who's Michelle?
-[man groans] -Oh, Obama?
Well, sir, you're putting me in quite the pickle. I can't...
I can't say I'll fuck Michelle Obama, that's insane.
[exhales] Well, I guess... I...
[audience laughs]
I mean, 'cause I wouldn't kill any of those women.
But I'd fuck all three of them.
[laughter and applause]
Uh, the gentleman in the blue Oxford, standing up.
Tell us a story with Charlie Murphy.
-Tell a story about Charlie Murphy? -[man] Or your favorite.
Boy, there's so many good Charlie Murphy...
The thing with Charlie Murphy is he used to just make us laugh all the time.
And I used to ask him about all the old Hollywood shit I was curious about,
like when they used to accuse Michael Jackson, I remember asking,
I go, "Charlie, do you think
Michael Jackson actually did those things?"
And he said, "Let me ask you a question, Dave." He said...
He said, "Say it is illegal to fuck women.
How long are you staying out of jail?"
So God bless Charlie Murphy, wherever you are, Charlie. I love him.
[cheers and applause]
Who do you think is going to win the 2020 election?
[audience murmuring]
All right. I'm going to put a pin in this, but I'll tell you right now, I don't know.
But I think Trump has a better shot than a lot of people would like to think.
I'm just saying, it all depends on how the left talks.
The way we're talking is not going to win the fucking ballgame.
Donald Trump's over on the right, grabbing handfuls of pussy.
Joe Biden can't even smell hair over here, fuck this side.
[audience exclaiming]
-All right, ma'am, go ahead. -Thank you so much for this show and...
-[Dave] How old are you? -[chuckles]
Twenty five.
-Twenty five? -Yeah.
[exhales] Boy, don't let R. Kelly see you, He gonna...
[audience laughing]
He's going to pee on you by accident. "Oh, my bad. I thought she was 15."
"Yuck."
Um... [chuckles]
I'm totally joking. I'm sorry. [chuckles]
Um, my question is, um, is there anything you've learned from another comedian
that you feel like will stay with you for life?
I'll tell you what, miss, that's a good question.
Uh, "Yes" is the short answer.
A longer version of it is this: I was raised by comedians.
I started doing stand-up when I was 14.
The other day I went to a comedian's funeral
and I realized as we was putting this motherfucker in the ground,
that these people are at least as influential to me as my family.
I rock with these niggas till the wheel falls off.
We fight and we fuss, and we get jealous of each other,
and we get mad at each other, but my life wouldn't have been what it was
without each and every one of them. And I consider them my family.
That's your answer.
[whooping and cheering]
[Dave] My favorite Club in America...
is a club in San Francisco called the Punch Line. It's a very small room.
It's a 200-seat room.
And...
I was working out the material that was going to be the show tonight.
I still hadn't figured out exactly how to say what I wanted to say,
but I was doing pretty good. And I was doing some "Me Too" jokes.
And a woman... stood up from the audience, and she was crying.
-Clearly, it was a white woman. -[audience laughs]
She says... She says to me, she says, "You can't say that!"
It's a 200-seat room, a very small room, I'm like, "What the fuck--?"
-Like, "Miss, are you okay? What are...?" -She says, "You can't say that!"
I said, "Yes, I can, it's my show. I'll say whatever the fuck I want."
The crowd was like, "Ooh!" Like this.
Um...
And then, she gets up from the table
and she starts making a big, like, show, just pushing through the aisles
and all this stuff. And there's, like, a curtain right before the front door
and she gets to the curtain, and she's crying. This is fucking crazy.
She says, "I'm sorry I was raped."
It's a fucking comedy club.
That's like loud farting getting out of an elevator.
[blows raspberry]
"Nothing funny can happen in here."
Now I'm trapped in a room with this woman's fucking stink.
[audience chuckling]
And I say... I say, "Miss...
Miss...
it is not your fault...
that you were raped.
But it's not mine either. Ta-ta, bitch." Like this...
[scattered laughter and clapping]
She storms out. Now the room is very uncomfortable,
but I managed to get the crowd back.
But I'm, like, you know, a little traumatized.
Same show...
there's a trans woman sitting in the audience.
This is a true story, this was like a few weeks ago.
I did six shows that weekend.
This trans woman came to four of them.
Calls herself Daphne.
Man, this chick Daphne was in there cracking the fuck up
at everything I said about everybody. It was amazing.
She was laughing. And it was fun to watch her laugh.
You could tell she was letting go of something that was heavy.
And she'd throw her head back and she'd smile with all her teeth.
She was having a great time.
And the more fun she had, I felt bad.
'Cause I knew... I had some trans jokes to unload.
[laughing]
And I thought to myself, "Maybe I shouldn't say these jokes,
'cause I don't want to, like, fuck her evening up.
She's having so much fun." But then I thought to myself,
"Well, if I can't say in front of her, should I say this shit at all?"
So I let her rip.
[laughing]
And to my surprise, Daphne laughed harder at the trans jokes
than anybody in the room. In fact, everybody in the room would look at her
to make sure it was okay.
-[audience laughing -[scattered clapping]
And...
I got off stage, in the dressing room, like, "That was a fucking weird show."
I'm sitting in the dressing room, by myself, trying to figure out, like,
"What the fuck just happened out there?"
Like, "Why is it that this one woman can't take any of these jokes
and Daphne can take all of these jokes? So weird."
And then I realized... Ah! Daphne used to be a man.
[audience laughing]
[scattered clapping]
So, now, I go out of the dressing room and, like, you can see, like,
all the staff was there, like, cleaning the club up,
the audience had gone.
And sitting at the bar by herself... was Daphne.
And she's like, "Hey, Dave, come join me for a drink."
And I don't want her to think that I'm transphobic, so I'm like, "Fuck it,
I guess I could have at least a drink."
And we get some tequila and we're sitting there.
And she was fucking cool. Turns out that Daphne, she wants to be a comedian.
She was asking me for advice, I told her advice and all this shit.
And then she says to me, she says,
"Boy, you sure do get a bad rap for your trans jokes."
I said "Daphne, thank you, but you don't have to say that.
I hope I didn't offend you." She goes, "No... No, no, no."
She said, "In fact, I read about you in The New York Times." I said, "You did?"
She said, "Yeah.
I thought it was interesting that they blamed you for R. Kelly.
They said you normalized him for telling jokes about him."
I go, "Yeah, yeah, they said that."
She goes, "I wonder why they never said that you normalized transgenders
by telling jokes about us."
-[whooping and cheering] -[applause]
And I'd never thought about that, it had never occurred to me.
And we started making out. And then, like...
-[audience laughing] -I...
I reached up just to see what it felt like.
I was like, "Oh, what does...?"
And it felt like pussy, it did. It was like...
Go ahead, ask me a question.
[man] What the fuck you gonna do if Trump get re-elected?
[audience exclaiming]
Uh, what am I gonna do if Trump get re-elected?
Probably get a significant tax break.
[audience laughs]
[Dave] Hey.
You want to know why I don't even talk about Trump in my show?
Because that motherfucker is not the Hokey Pokey.
He is not what it's all about.
There's millions of people that put him in power.
And the ideas that he puts forth... uh, are not his own.
He's singing poor white people's greatest hits.
So why the fuck would I worry about him?
And not the other millions?
Really, know who I'm gonna vote for next time,
if things keep going the way it's going, is that gay dude.
-[audience member shouting indistinctly] -No, Mike Pence.
[audience laughing and applauding]
[somber piano music playing]
[Dave] Now, this is the same club, the Punch Line, this is 15 years ago.
And I had just gotten back from my infamous, uh, South Africa trip.
And I came to the Punch Line, just to cheer myself up.
It's a safe place where I could tell some jokes.
And.... I find out that
this comedian I know, Chris Tucker, who was in all those Rush Hour movies...
I find out that Chris is in San Francisco too, at some charity event.
So I call him, like, "Yo, I just saw you at some charity event."
I'm doing the show at the Punch Line. Why don't you come by the club
-after your event?" -He's like, "Cool, Dave.
I thought you was dead, nigga. I'll come by." He said...
[audience laughing]
He says, "Is it okay if I bring some friends 'cause I'm with a lot of people."
I go, "Man, you're Chris Tucker, you can bring whoever the fuck you want."
And then I show up to the club...
late that night.
I walk into the dressing room, and sitting in the dressing room...
is, uh, Gavin Newsom, who at the time was the mayor of San Francisco,
but now he's the governor of California.
And sitting next to him was Kamala Harris,
who at the time was the DA of San Francisco.
Now she's a senator from California that's front-running on the Democratic ticket.
[scattered cheers and clapping]
And sitting next to her was Al Gore.
That's fucking weird.
[audience laughs]
And sitting next to Al Gore was the guys from Google, Sergey and...
-I don't know how to say these... -[woman] Whoo!
All right.
[audience laughs]
And it was Chris Tucker and Ben Jealous,
who at the time was the president of the NAACP,
who was all just at this big charity dinner. And, and...
And Paul Mooney was drinking scotch.
[audience laughs]
And we all was just in there.
You know, at first, I was a little uncomfortable. We start talking
and we all got along really well.
Mmm...
At some point, uh, Kamala Harris says... she says to me, she goes,
"You know, a friend of mine is announcing his candidacy for president tomorrow.
I went to college with him."
I'm like, "What the--?" I go, "Barack Obama?"
She goes, "You've heard of him."
I'm like, "Yo, I just read about this dude."
And she goes, "Yo, yeah..."
Blah, blah. We're talking. She goes, "You know what? Let's--
Let's call him on the phone."
-I said, "What the fuck?" -[audience laughs]
She picks the phone up and she dials, and she's listening like this...
And she goes... "Ah..." [clicks tongue] "It's his voice mail."
And she gives me the phone and goes, "Leave him a message."
I didn't know what to say.
I just said what you say to any black dude that's running for president:
"Stay low, run in a zig-zag pattern," this kind of shit.
[audience laughing]
-[whistling] -[clapping]
And then the last thing I say is... You know what?
I said, "Sir, I really do believe you can do this. Man, I'm wishing you luck."
Now...
Next day I wake up and go for coffee at a place called The Embarcadero.
It's like an eatery by the sea in San Francisco,
and I'm walking to the coffee shop and there's a police line.
And I can't cross... the tape.
But I figure, "Ah, fuck it, I'm Dave Chappelle"
-so I go under the thing, like this. -[audience laughs]
And the police yoke me.
These motherfuckers, like, tackle me immediately.
And I see...
over the police's shoulder, Gavin Newsom.
I couldn't remember his name, but I remember the night before
I had kept teasing him and saying he looked like Christian Bale,
the guy from the Batman movies.
Uh, so I see him and I can't remember the name, so I'm like, "Batman, help."
[audience laughing]
And he stops, he's like, "Dave?"
And then the police see that the mayor knows me.
So they're all like, "Oh, sorry about that. Uh..."
And he's like, "Back up, everybody,"
He picks me up, like, "I'm really sorry about that."
I'm like, "Ah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it."
And he's like... he's like, "Listen, I'm here with the prince.
Would you like to meet him?"
I'm like, "I know Prince, that's my nigga."
And we go around the corner and it was Prince Charles, the Prince of England.
[audience laughing]
I didn't know the protocol of meeting royalty. You're not supposed to touch 'em.
I dapped him up like a nigga. "My nigga."
-[audience laughing] -[grunts]
I was hugging him and shit like this, dapping him up. [grunting]
Like this. And that nigga was cool, too.
It was really fucking weird.
And then I was just out there in the Upside Down,
not having no TV show, trying to figure life out,
and the election was going on in the background,
and this guy, Barack Obama, was picking up steam.
This motherfucker was killing it.
And I had a chance to go to the last debate on the Democratic ticket.
And I went. It was me and Chris Tucker,
sitting in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
It was the last three candidates. It was Barack Obama,
John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
Now, Obama is a lot taller than Edwards and Clinton,
and he had the center podium. And at one point,
they're all on stage and they start fussing,
and then Obama goes, "Look, none of us are perfect." Like this.
His hands was like this, and there was a light shining behind his head,
and the other two candidates was looking up at the nigga,
and I'm sitting in the audience, like, "This nigga looks like Jesus."
[audience laughing]
[scattered clapping]
And I realized, in that moment...
that I was looking at the next president of the United States. I was certain of it.
-I couldn't explain it. -[people cheering]
But I knew what I was seeing. And I got really excited.
And I'm not that kind of guy. I said, "I gotta meet this motherfucker."
So I stayed. They were all on stage doing interviews,
and I just waited. I was waiting and waiting.
And then John Edwards was done with his interviews first,
'cause everybody knew he wasn't gonna win. Uh...
And I see John Edwards, and I said, "Hey, Senator Edwards, I just wanted to say hi."
That motherfucker looked at me like, "Mm-mmm."
I'm like, "Fuck you, nigga, you gonna lose anyway."
And he left. And then Hillary Clinton just walked by me
in one of them Steve Harvey suits.
[audience laughing]
[scattered clapping]
But Obama was taking forever.
Everybody wanted to talk to him,
and I knew the media saw exactly what I saw.
There was no question about it.
That was the guy.
I waited and I waited and finally... Must have been over an hour and a half.
He finishes his last interview.
He's like, "Thank you very much, good talking to you." And he turns around,
and he-- We make eye contact.
He sees me. And when he sees me, he looks over, he goes... [inhales]
"Dave Chappelle."
-[laughter and cheering] -[scattered clapping]
And... And Obama did me the same way I did Prince Charles.
He dapped me up... [grunts]
And he, like, bro-hugged me, and he pulled me in.
I'll never forget this, he said in my ear...
"I got your message."
[audience laughs]
Thank you very much, New York City.
Good night.
[cheers and applause]
[audience noise fades out]
[somber piano music playing]
[man] By the way... vanglorious.
This is protected by the red...
the black and the green.
At the Crossroad, with a key.
Sissy.