Dave Chappelle New York Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

Dave Chappelle in New York — FAQ

About Dave Chappelle

David Khari Webber Chappelle was born August 24, 1973 in Washington DC and raised between DC and Yellow Springs, Ohio in a family of academics — his father a professor at Antioch College, his mother a Unitarian Universalist minister who had worked for Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in DC, started open-mics in New York at fourteen, and was working the Boston Comedy Club and Comedy Cellar circuit as a teenager. The 1990s ran on film and television cameos — Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Mel Brooks's stamp of approval; Half Baked, the 1998 stoner comedy he co-wrote with Neal Brennan; The Nutty Professor opposite Eddie Murphy; You've Got Mail; Con Air; Blue Streak; Undercover Brother — alongside the half-hour HBO special that anchored his stand-up reputation. In 2003 Chappelle's Show launched on Comedy Central with Neal Brennan, and the sketch run that produced Clayton Bigsby, Tyrone Biggums, the Rick James and Prince stories, and Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories became a cultural artifact whose half-life is still measurable. Mid-Season Three in 2005, Chappelle walked away from a reported $50 million renewal and flew to South Africa — a decision he would later explain on Oprah and on Inside the Actor's Studio as a refusal to be commodified at a scale he no longer recognized. The decade between 2005 and 2014 was the sabbatical: occasional Cellar drop-ins, a Yellow Springs life with his wife Elaine Mendoza Erfe and their three children, and almost no recorded material. The 2014 Radio City residency was the comeback announcement; the 2016 Netflix deal — three specials for a reported $60 million — was the financial reset that re-aligned the post-walkout math. The Netflix run produced eleven hours of specials in seven years, including The Age of Spin and Deep in the Heart of Texas (both 2017), Equanimity and The Bird Revelation (both 2017), Sticks & Stones (2019), the free YouTube release 8:46 (2020, recorded in his backyard in Ohio), The Closer (2021, which generated significant controversy from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups over material on the trans community), What's in a Name? (2022), The Dreamer (2023), and The Hot Box (2024). He received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in 2019. The Yellow Springs life remained the throughline — the town where he raised his family, the converted firehouse he turned into a community space, and the venue where he ran a long pandemic-era series of open-air comedy nights that drew comics from across the country.

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