For those who think "Half Baked" is their all-time favorite movie, Feb. 25 was a sacred night in the history of our little town -- Dave Chappelle came through Albuquerque on Tuesday as a part of his nationwide tour, "Dave Chappelle is Blackzilla."
Gracing the stage a little after 11 p.m. to the sounds of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, Chappelle immediately launched into a personalized topic for us here in New Mexico, saying that he was glad that he had finally gotten to see a "real Indian."
"I was littering and I saw a tear running down his face and I thought, 'Damn, this guy is the real deal,'" he said.
Chappelle often seemed to have tweaked his show a little to fit into the local settings, which was a nice added touch, like when he told the audience, "This town is big! But it's empty. I've never seen a tumbleweed in the middle of a big town before."
The audience was with him for the whole ride, laughing heavily at most of his jokes.
After his soft-voiced opener, Chappelle went on for about 30 minutes, riffing on a variety of subjects from the police to his genitalia, even hitting on the possible U.S. war against Iraq. Chappelle ran quickly through his set, rushing to beat the clock to midnight. He hit upon masturbation, terrorism via anthrax in the mail: "Good idea, terrorists. Send a curable disease in the mail to take us out in big numbers," and his trip back to Africa -- "It didn't feel like home to me. I couldn't even plug my PlayStation in."
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He finally got to the subject of his most famous movie, "Half Baked," only after prodded by an audience member who kept shouting out the title. He said that he didn't want to stay on the topic too long, but he did offer up this: "It's not good to smoke weed and make movies. I ain't even know I was in that movie 'till I saw it on cable."
Urged on by all the talk of his movie, Chappelle spoke of marijuana and Hollywood's cocaine addiction saying, "everyone else is doing those fast drugs. I do the slow ones, can't keep up with those people."
He touched on Disney World or, rather, his distaste for Mickey Mouse. He mentioned Ray Croc, founder of McDonalds, planning his future business' success by scheming not to use beef, but the flesh of poor people from third-world countries and said that "even by caveman standards, I'd be a chauvinist."
Chappelle was consistently funny, but not funny enough. The timing of the show was late, preventing Chappelle from running more than an hour of his own material. Still, the crowd loved him.
Chappelle never tried to get serious, which was a good move on his part, since he was at his funniest when dealing with, as he put it, "poop jokes."
