Okay, I got this info from Salon.com's AP list:
Comedian Dave Chappelle wants to set things straight: "I'm not crazy, I'm not smoking crack," he tells Time magazine in an interview more than a week after his hit Comedy Central show was suspended and the rumors started to fly.
"I'm definitely stressed out," said Chappelle, who took off last month to South Africa for a "spiritual retreat," leaving his fans - and even his agent and publicist - wondering where he went.
"You hear so many voices jockeying for position in your mind that you want to make sure that you hear your own voice," he said. "So I figured, let me just cut myself off from everybody, take a minute and pull a Flintstone - stop a speeding car by using my bare feet as the brakes."
Those toes must be smoking...more at the jump.
Here's some greatest hits from the
Time.com interview with reporter Tim Farley:
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.
Reasonable. I'm glad he's taking the time because others have not and blown themselves away. Plus he's pinpointed some problems, especially with one dynamic within his inner circle: the breakdown of trust. "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." That meant that he felt that he had to question the quality of work that they were going to produce in the future.
Anyway, read the article. Discuss amongst yourselves. Only he knows what he's doing and let's hope and pray it's the right way for him...and the best laughs for us.
