Silky Johnson - Notable Sketches

Notable Sketches

Rather than acting out sketches in front of a live studio audience, the sketches were prerecorded with the audience reaction usually used in lieu of a laugh track. According to Neal Brennan in Season 2 DVD commentary, the production team never edits in pre-recorded laughs, with the exception of the "Dude's Night Out" sketch due to the lack of reaction from the audience. Many of the sketches were heavily ad-libbed, most notably The Mad Real World sketch.

• A Moment in the Life of Lil' Jon – Chappelle plays rapper/producer Lil' Jon doing normal, everyday tasks, with a vocabulary consisting of almost nothing but the words 'Yeah!', 'WHAT?!', and 'O-kay!' The real Lil' Jon appeared in one sketch opposite Chappelle's character, with Lil' Jon speaking in an excessively dignified accent. The rapper credited the sketch with increasing his visibility. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, " We could have filled this list with 100 reasons we miss Chappelle's Show, but the biggest one would have to be his riotous celebrity impressions."

• Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories – Charlie Murphy (who also wrote the sketches) retells his encounters with 1980s celebrities, the most popular being the Rick James story, which is widely regarded as Chappelle's magnum opus. The sketch features Murphy as himself and Chappelle as James, including incidents such as James slapping Murphy, interspersed with scenes of the present-day Rick James (portrayed by James himself), trying to cover up for his past behavior, saying, "Cocaine's a hell of a drug." The sketch spawned one of the show's popular catchphrases, "I'm Rick James, bitch!", which Chappelle, as James, repeatedly declares. The sketch attained even greater public attention when, in 2005, a candidate for city council in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, also named Rick James but unrelated to the singer, had many of his "Vote Rick James" campaign signs defaced by writing "Vote Rick James bitch!" or stolen by fans of the sketch. The other "True Hollywood Story" depicted Murphy and his crew playing a pickup game of basketball against Prince.

• Frontline – A spoof of the PBS series Frontline. The first Frontline sketch, Blind Supremacy, featured the life of Clayton Bigsby (played by Chappelle), a biography of a blind white supremacist who is not aware that he is actually a black man. This sketch was part of the first episode and garnered attention for its extensive use of the word "nigger" (mostly spoken by Chappelle's character). The sketch has been compared to the iconic Saturday Night Live sketch from 1975 featuring Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor which received similar reactions for its use of the word. Other Frontline sketches featured stories of racist animal actors and gay versions of everything from the DMV to the KKK.

• Racial Draft – A spoof of the NFL Draft which saw various celebrities such as Tiger Woods (Chappelle) and the Wu Tang Clan (playing themselves) being "drafted" into various "races" such as white, black, Jewish, Hispanic, and Asian, based on their perceived ethnicity or cultural leanings. Chappelle also played the white representative while rapper Mos Def played the black representative.

• WacArnold's – Chappelle gets a job as a young man at a fast food restaurant that portrays itself as providing a community service by offering jobs to disenfranchised, poor youth. A scene-by-scene mock of a 1990 McDonald's commercial is followed by Chappelle slowly realizing the job is embarrassing and he doesn't make enough money to support his family. He gets robbed and harassed on his way to work. During one encounter, a thug (played by Donnell Rawlings) quips, "Hey Calvin! It's a fine line between fries and shakes!" before he breaks into song, "The leanest burger in the world, could be the meanest burger in the world, if you cook it that way!". He follows by stating he has to "stop smoking this shit here" as his friends break out in laughter. The song is a remake of a 1971 song by The Persuaders (also covered by The Pretenders in 1983) "It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate".

• Wayne Brady's Show – After Dave Chappelle quits the show in an opening segment that coincidentally mirrored the contract negotiations for the aborted third season, Wayne Brady (portraying himself) takes over as host and is asked to emcee the remaining episodes of the series since Chappelle had already filmed the remaining sketches. Regretting the decision to leave the show, Chappelle returns and confronts Brady. The ensuing confrontation leads to the airing of a flashback to a night of misadventures involving the two that portrays Brady (contrary to his friendly public image) as a murderous, pimping and seriously disturbed psychopath in the mold of Denzel Washington's character Alonzo Harris from the film Training Day.

• When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong – A documentary style sketch which serves as a cautionary tale about when not to "keep it real" (be completely honest). The sketch depicts events in which a character is just minding their business until someone else says or does something that the first character doesn't like. The character is given a choice: ignore the alleged provocation, or "keep it real" (get confrontational and be antagonistic with whomever provoked them), with the character going with the latter, all the while boasting about how they "keep it real". Eventually the character's decision backfires severely on them, thus ruining their life, while the person who provoked them is having the time of their life, and the character's friends shunning the character's choice to "keep it real".