Dave Chappelle

And they're like, what is this music?

But I felt like before there was an Internet, I got a good sampling of culture that way.

And that upbringing really did kind of...

helped me become the type of comedian I am.

It made me less afraid of people.

And this is gonna sound weird here, but it made me not afraid of white people.

So in comedy, in like say the 80s, really the 90s,

comedy circuits were segregated.

And people don't know that.

The black comedians played one set of rooms and white comedians played one set of rooms.

And Washington, which was a majority black city, didn't have any black clubs until a few years later.

into my career not to say that it was always like that but for just like full-time comedy rooms uh you know i was i started out in what they would call white rooms i can remember one of the owners saying when i started out that he didn't like more than one black comic on the show because he said it it would offend his audience it's like dude it's it's washington right right uh

But I always played anywhere that anyone would listen.

And I didn't realize until I was a little older when I would see some comedians hit like an invisible wall.

They would never play Sunset Boulevard or they'd never go play Greenwich Village or certain comedy staples that they just considered white rooms.

They felt safer on Crenshaw or on this place or that place.

They thought they wouldn't be understood.

And I thought that the challenge of art was no matter where you go,

You should try to be understood.

I don't know, something about that upbringing, the duality between Ohio and Washington, I think made me game to become what I became.