In an attempt to do something different last night, I looked up some comedy clubs to visit. The Comedy Village set in Greenwich Village caught my eye since the location has been a comedy spot for 25 years—Comedy Village for the last three years, the Great Boston Comedy Club before that, and Paper Moon for the years prior. Our show started at 11pm and was supposed to run for two hours, making way for the late night show.
Just after midnight and four comics down, the host came back on and mused about it being his favorite part of the show because the audience had no idea how many comics were left. It could be two, or it could be fifty eight. And that’s when he surprised us all by saying a special guest had dropped by and DAVE CHAPPELLE walked on stage!! We found out that the Comedy Village is closing on May 10th and Dave popped by to deliver one final performance at the place where he began his career 15 years ago. He reminisced on how he put the bricks in place behind the stage and wondered why the Christmas lights were still up from 1994.
People milled in all night as word spread through the neighborhood that they had the chance to see the virtuoso in action. At one point we asked a guy who squeezed in beside us if he had been to the club before. His drunken response was, “Heck no! I was at the club next door when I heard Dave was here.” He also let us know that they were charging $30 at the door for what we paid $15.
The performance itself was a masterclass! Dave went non-stop for four hours and did a great job of engaging the intimate crowd and even called people on stage. For instance, he called on a couple of girls who entered with huge shopping bags. Turns out they were catching a flight to San Francisco for a bachelorette party but not before Dave had gone through the entire contents of the bags—dildos and weird lingerie included. Later on Dave had a personal moment which reminded him of his sketch work. He asked a guy from the front row to slowly lift a chair up high above his head with a look of astonishment as Dave played the HEROES theme music from his iPod (while sticking the mic to his headphones).
Three of my friends and I sat in the first row and Dave constantly made conversation with us, albeit making fun of us mostly. At one point he did a whole routine on my name. He couldn’t get over the fact that my name was Gaurav but since he pronounced it “Garv”, he deemed it incomplete and went on to compare it to introducing himself as just “Day” or calling a Steve just “Stee”. He was intrigued by the fact that I work in comics and even asked if we had a website so I promptly handed over a business card—what can i say, we work with a lot of celebrities so the synergies do exist.
Guests kept dropping in to say their goodbyes and at one point Dave had two other comedians and friends of his on stage as they went down memory lane, recounting experiences they had together at the club. Before closing (3:30-4:00am), Dave started rambling about politics and race but then very coherently summarized his views on globalization and the shifting “paradigm of international economics”. He stressed that corporate agendas are creating conflict for America globally and hoped that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could fix that come November.
What was supposed to be a laid-back and early night turned out to be a long, surreal experience with a top-notch stand-up comedian and satirist whose work I can’t say I’m intimate with but was certainly blown away by his wit.
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Tags: comedy, Dave Chappelle, greenwich village, Greer Barnes, PJ Landers, stand-up comedy
