Dave's still the funniest man in America, but you can totally see why he walked away. It seems like almost half the material is about the corrupting influence -- instantaneous and egomaniacal -- of his newfound wealth.
He speaks directly to it in one of the last skits shown, where the show business god tells him that this is the time for him to make all the money he can, that traditional 3rd season (if the show's a hit) extension negotiation. Dave just wants to keep speaking the truth, he modestly tells the god. Instead he gets a litany of all the proper exploitative moves to make at this juncture in his career.
Chappelle walked away from a reported $40 million to keep going after two brilliant seasons of constantly replayed and DVDized half -hour sketch shows, the best exploration of race in humor of our time. I seem to remember something he said a few months ago like, "try telling your wife you're walking away from forty million dollars" and since then he's made the concert movie (with comedy), Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
The main nouveau riche humor, the outrageous stuff, are two separate segments, one where he's going around doing vengeance to anyone who ever slighted him in the least, to the point of arson, and another where he's cooking with a dinosaur egg and killing the little guy that pops out.
Wwe're witness to a whole new (for Dave) kind of self-loathing that roars through these pieces, and you just have to think that the sudden elevation after so many years not getting pilots picked up or the choice movie roles, the sudden trip down Easy Street, well, Dave must have felt it messing with his mojo.
There's little doubt that wealth has not made the gifted Jerry Seinfeld more appealing to audiences. Where's the struggle? Even as he got rich from, maybe, year 3 to year 9 of Seinfeld, the show itself kept Jerry in suspended animation, still the struggling comic just starting to get those steady successes.
Wealth can be comedy kryptonite, and I understand Chris Rock is wary of this as well. So Chappelle, son of a college professor and Unitarian minister, is pretty much wired to be damned suspicious of all that sudden money, and all the pressures that come with protecting that capital henceforth, for yourself and your employers.
His material is just as cutting edge as before, but according to the hosts of the "Lost Episodes", he had issues with the scary funny "pixie" piece which includes some blackface work. (There's a fairly good description in Wikipedia.) As he told the woman he knocked up in a previous season's skit, Oprah earlier this year:
"I would go to work on the show and I felt awful every day, that's not the way it was. ... I felt like some kind of prostitute or something. If I feel so bad, why keep on showing up to this place? I'm going to Africa. The hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself, especially when everybody is watching."
I can't imagine Chappelle is thrilled that the "Lost Episodes" made it to the public in this form, but I'm assuming Charlie and Donnell wouldn't have done it were Dave to never work with them again. They were sensitive enough to do an in-studio opinion session with lots of audience members getting a chance to voice their views about the pixie sketch on-camera, and some folks seem to fall close to Dave's opinion.
I'm just happy that we get to see his very last work for Comedy Central, probably ever, as the content of the sketches provides the only adequate closer to the whole stupid question of whether Chappelle was out of his mind walking away from that huge pile 'o' dough, following some sort of bliss to Africa, and taking control of his creative life again. This last material is perhaps his most naked, and the very genius is that it completely explains why he did it.
He was sane.
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