Dave Chappelle compares being attacked onstage to Chris Rock’s Oscar slap in ‘The Dreamer’ comedy special
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Dave Chappelle is back with more jokes and outrage in his new comedy special The Dreamer, which debuted on streaming giant Netflix on Sunday (Dec. 31).
The 56-minute set touches on a bit of everything, from his past controversy regarding remarks about the LGBTQ+ community to comedians, like himself and Chris Rock, coming face-to-face with spontaneous rage on stage.
As previously reported by REVOLT, Chappelle was tackled by knife-wielding 23-year-old Isaiah Lee while performing at the Hollywood Bowl in May 2022. Around this time last year, Lee was sentenced to nine months in jail in connection with the assault. The comic found humor in the aftermath and rehashed it for the taping of the special.
“Man, when that guy tackled me, it was like a movie or something. You gotta picture this. Picture a famous person you like. Every famous person you could imagine was at that show. It was like the biggest night that Hollywood had ever seen, and when that guy tackled me, he cleared the bleachers,” he began.
“I had to watch the tape afterwards to know this happened, but as soon as he tackled me, Jamie Foxx was the first motherf**ker that jumped out of the crowd. He was wearing a white cowboy hat like he knew this s**t was going to happen to me,” said Chappelle as fans erupted into laughter.
He noted that Foxx chased the man around like a scene from Any Given Sunday, but to no avail. His friend Jon Stewart, the former host of “The Daily Show,” was described as jumping heroically like “Super Jew” from backstage to his rescue. But again, Lee managed to escape those efforts. Chappelle said that the young man was captured just before making his way to the exit.
“Every celebrity just ran out because every celebrity saw themselves in me, and they just started beating the f**k out of that kid. And I know Chris was backstage looking like, ‘Nobody helped me,’” said the comedian. He then sang the jingle to “Everybody Hates Chris.”
The jab was a clear punchline referencing the infamous 2022 Oscars when Will Smith slapped Rock while on stage for an off-the-cuff joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, which sparked over a year of headlines about the fallout from the fiasco. Chappelle said that if it were him who the box office star struck, things would have ended differently.
“I do now know what Will Smith would not have done, and that is enjoy the rest of his evening,” he said. After the incident, Smith went on to accept his first Oscar and even attended an afterparty. Rock controversially addressed the slap in detail in his own Netflix special, Selective Outrage, in March.
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