Dave Chappelle: What’s in a Name?

This... is... surreal.

In 1987...

1987, I moved back...

from Ohio to D.C.

And-- and-- and enrolled in Eastern High School,

-and did... - Whoo!

You must not have went there when I went there, champ.

Those were tough times is the way I remember it.

When I had gone, I-- I had lived with my father for three years.

I went to middle school in Ohio, and when I'd gotten back to Washington,

the crack epidemic was in full swing, and the city was

largely unrecognizable to me.

Now I was an older kid, and-- and-- and kids my age were doing a lot of

wild things that I-- I didn't know that kids would do.

I-- I'd never seen a kid with a pager before,

I didn't know anything about selling drugs, any of that shit.

All I knew, every day when I went to Eastern, I didn't feel safe.

I'm a quiet guy, naturally.

I'm a shy person, naturally.

And I used to get my

hair cut on a barbershop on 15th Street Northeast.

And I would go there, and, uh...

and everyone in the barbershop would just snap on each other.

And I'd sit in the corner, and I-- and I'd watch everybody,

and just listen to all these jokes. The guys were funny as shit,

but-- but one day, after a few weeks of goin' there

and gettin' my hair cut,

they-- they-- they turned the jokes on me.

I call that day The Barbershop Massacre.

I lit everybody in that barbershop up, I had been sittin' in there

listening to 'em for weeks talk about each other,

I knew every inside joke about each and every one of 'em,

and they couldn't believe I knew this stuff.

I lit their asses up.

From then on in the neighborhood, people kind of liked me, like, "Okay...

he's pretty funny."

Time magazine released an article about Bill Cosby.

The headline said, "Fifty, Funny, and Filthy Rich,"

and I read that article and it was when I was looking at his face,

before all that disgrace,

that I looked and I said, "I could do that."

I told my father and my father said, "Well, then just do it."

I said, "Well, I wouldn't even know where to start," and he said,

"Well, look in the phone book." It's before the internet, if you're young.

We used to have a book with phone numbers in it.

My father found for me the local comedy club in Washington, D.C.

I called 'em...

I found out when Open Mic night was,

and I started to go there on Tuesday nights... and just watch.

And then one night I went on a weekend.

I would-- I would get my money together and I would go to this comedy club

and I would just watch these comedians, and sometimes...

sometimes they would talk to me.

And I told one of the comedians after the show one night, I said,

"Man, I really wanna try to do this."

And-- and he said, "Well..." He said...

He said, "If you wanna be a good comedian,

you should know how to act."

I said, "Why?" And he says, you know...

He didn't explain it.

I said, "Okay," and I told my parents,

and-- and this is how I came to find out about Duke Ellington. My mother,

she said, "There's a place you can go where you can learn to act

right in Washington. It's a-- It's a high school." I said, "You mean I would...

get out of Eastern?"

The school year was already in full swing and Ellington has a policy that

they don't let people just come in the middle of the year,

but Lynda Gravatt was the head of the theater department at the time.

Very graciously took a meeting with me and my mother, and...

I get emotional thinking about it.

Anybody that went here?

Remember what it was first like?

- Yes! Yes! -When you first walked through the door?

It was in the afternoon, and everyone was in their arts classes,

and the girls had tutus on,

and everyone was weird, and walking around the hallway, like, you weren't sure

where anyone was supposed to be, and you could hear people

practicing their horns and shit all through the hallways.

There was art bouncing off the walls, the minute I walked through the door,

there was a gallery of-- of all these children's work

and these pictures were amazing.

My first thought...

when I walked through that door:

"I'm not good enough to be here.

I'm sure."

And Miss Gravatt sat me down, she told me about the school,

and you remember Miss Gravatt? She was very businesslike.

But also very warm.

She was intimidating, but palpably kind.

She was a paradox of a human being.

She gave me a date for an audition.

My mother said, "Okay, Dave, it's on you." Now...

Those of you who know me...

know that I didn't prepare for that audition.

That audition was like a-- a possession,

it was just something that I was proud to have.

But as the days got closer, I'm like, "Oh, my God, I gotta get--

I gotta get something together." I didn't even know how to do an audition,

And I had never done it before, so I went and I said-- I said, "What do I need?"

They said, "A monologue," I... So I looked up "monologue."

And I went to the library, the MLK Library, this huge library,

so I gotta find something, and I found a piece

in one of those yellow script books, it was a monologue by Mark Twain

called "The Judge's Spirited Woman."

And I learned it in a night.

You know, it was not hard for me to memorize things.

The next day, it was a Saturday, I think, and I came to the school,

and they auditioned in what used to be this room-- the original...

theater, Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

And all the department heads sat in here, and the light's in your eyes,

and there's a bunch of kids who already go to the school, who come on Saturday,

just to see... who might be coming.

And I talked to all these kids before I went in, and these kids

were nothing like the kids at Eastern.

They were like them, but they were different, they were weird,

funny, and self-deprecating, things like this.

And I remember I came out on stage...

and I did my audition,

and it was like... like, terrible.

I-- I froze up in the beginning, I started, and then I said,

"Wait a minute, I'm messing up, I'm gonna start again."

And I was nervous, and I was scared, and... and...

in the middle of the audition, I'm in the middle of the monologue,

uh, one of the teachers, Fred Lee, he said-- Fred Lee, he goes,

"Okay, that's enough."

I said, "Well, there's still a little more," he goes, "No, no, no, no, no...

That is enough," he said.

And I-- I can't tell you, like, I-- I was crushed.

Uh... without saying his disapproval, I knew it stunk.

And I was right. When I walked in here, I knew

I wasn't good enough to go to this school.

And I thought to myself, "Ah, fuck this school, that's stupid anyway."

In first-year theater, there's a question that they ask students from time to time.

And it's a make-or-break question, and...

And we ask this question, you don't know.

And the question is this:

They say, "Why do you wanna act?"

Now...

if you say anything like, "I wanna be a star,"

you're not...

You're not gonna get in. I didn't know that.

And I figured I already blew the audition, so I told them the truth.

He said, "Why do you wanna act?" "I don't."

That's what I said.

And they said, "Well then, why are you here?"

I said, "Because I wanna be a comedian and some comedian told me that if I wanna be

a good comedian, I need to learn how to act."

And the teachers look at each other and go,

"Thank you very much," and I left.

And I was walking down the hallway kicking rocks.

It was a kid that already went here, his name was Ako Handy.

And Ako said, "Hey, man, I listened to them talking about you."

I said, "You did?" He said, "You're in." I said, "What?" He said, "You're in."

But it didn't make any sense.

Somehow we worked it out so that they gave me an early enrollment,

and I left Eastern within weeks of that,

and I came to Duke Ellington and it was better than I could have ever imagined.

I didn't have the suspicion that most new kids get.

I was an oddity, a new toy, I was quirky, I wasn't a snappy dresser,

I didn't really know what the fuck was going on, because

the crack epidemic itself was new to me

and they were all refugees from their neighborhood schools.

In the morning,

we would have our academic classes, and then in the afternoon,

we would have our arts classes. It was a long school day.

We'd start at 8:30, we wouldn't leave here 'til five, sometimes 5:30.

Whenever they saw fit.

It's funny walking in here tonight,

'cause I saw the Pride flags up, and I remember when I came here

all those years ago, it's the first time I ever met a kid who was just, like, gay.

-It was never strange to us. - That's right.

Their sexuality or their gender identity

was the least remarkable thing about

a person that could dance as well as Roger Bellamy, or...

There was no distinction between any of that.

Everybody was weird in their own way.

And in a very strange way, because we spent so much time with one another.

We helped raise...

one another.

There's a camaraderie between these students

that I don't know that I've seen since

I left this school. I can remember, and I won't say names,

there was a student that went here

that used to sell drugs.

It wasn't just a student, but this particular guy...

This particular guy did the cardinal no-no on the streets. He did what they call

"not making your roll," which meant he got some drugs on consignment

and he didn't pay whoever gave him the drugs back.

And whoever gave him those drugs had declared,

"I'm gonna come to that school, and I'm gonna kill you," he said.

And my man was scared,

and word got around,

around school,

that the goons was coming.

And by the time the goons showed up, every dude that went to this school:

gay, straight, whatever the fuck,

was all standing out front, they say, "You'll have to kill all of us."

And who was in front of all of 'em?

Roger Bellamy with some leg warmers on like this.

I started making friends that are still my friends to this very day.