Dave Chappelle

Usually I don’t much pay too much nevermind to the celebrity interviews on Oprah, but today Dave Chappelle was on and I have to say his story was pretty interesting because he echoed a lot of my thoughts about Hollywood. If you haven’t heard, there’s been a lot of speculation about him in the media for a while because he walked away from a $50 million dollar contract on his successful show, and everyone was saying he was cracking up, he was on crack, you name it. And the way he told it, anyway, not that people don’t lie to Oprah, but he said that at that level, a lot of people want into your “pockets and your mind” and that what comes along with that recognition and success and money was just overwhelming. One of the ways he put it was a quote he heard somewhere, “Success takes you where character cannot sustain you,” which is essentially a very precise way of saying what I’ve been saying for years, that there is very often a point in the life of a celebrity where the normal rules of human behavior no longer apply. What’s fascinating to me about his story is that everyone thought he was crazy, when in my opinion, it was only that in this milieu, they’ve lost sight of what sane is. And he did not seem one bit more crazy than anyone else I know, he seemed pretty awesomely regular, in a comic genius kind of way.