Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
My mom wouldn’t know Dave Chappelle if he came up to her and slapped her across the face. Even if she did know who he was – the $50-plus million dollar man and America’s great runaway story of 2005-06 – she wouldn’t like him. She wouldn’t think anything he said was funny. She would call it stupid. It’s an assessment reserved for no one. Will Ferrell’s stupid. Peyton Manning’s stupid. Aquateen Hunger Force is stupid. Everything Evil Knievel’s ever done is stupid. She’s universal in her labels. But my mother would love these last three lost episodes of Chappelle’s Show, along with the blooper reel, VH1-styled “Making of Season 3-ish” documentary of those left at the show finding whatever unused footage they can from a computer’s hard drive and deleted skits that Comedy Central released on DVD two days after the third episode aired. She’d eat this up because – for better or for worse – she’s a completist and those are the only people who really needed this season-ish to happen and for it to become purchasable.

She went for Beanie Babies. Got every one of those little critters. She’s bought every one of those innumerable Nora Roberts romance novels and she shows John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks the same kinds of props. Knowing her, if she had been into Chappelle’s sketches that slurred stereotypes and nettled every creed and color imaginable in sharp and cutting social satire for two full seasons and worried about his health and his AWOL-trip to Africa like some many other millions of people, she would have probably pre-ordered. She would have been virtually queued up, wringing her hands in anticipation, ready to rip that cellophane wrapper into a million little pieces to get inside.

The first season of Chappelle’s Show is the best-selling television series on DVD of all-time. The second season is surely going to join the first season in the penthouse soon. But Chappelle walked away, for plenty of reasons – some he’s shared in candid interviews since his reappearance and others that he remains ambiguous about. He left the lights on knowing he would never return. He left the house half-painted. He left some doodles. He never left the pies on the ledge to cool. He was not waiting for the right time to serve them up to everyone who wanted to see and these three episodes and extras plainly show that. The unaired pieces of material are all half-done (introduced that way by unfortunate hosts Charlie Murphy and Donnell Rawlings) and regrettable. They aren’t funny and would have never been seen had Chappelle had any control over the matter. Much of the material that did appear in the three episodes that they were able to paperclip together was second-rate.

The best moments come when Chappelle’s using the enormous lump of money that’s supposedly coming his way to imagine how his life will change. He’s forced to pay $11,000 for a haircut ($8 is “the old price”) and he exacts revenge on all those who called him talentless or in some way dissed him before he became successful. He made revenge sweeter. Another of the worthwhile skits shows Chappelle flaunting his baller lifestyle in a send-up of MTV’s “Cribs.” In the skit, he is doing the obligatory kitchen/refrigerator scene when he shows off two dinosaur eggs and then cooks them into omelets for his posse in a showy display of clout.

“What’s that you say? You a fan of archeology? Right there on the bottom shelf, you might recognize this as a Tyrannosaurus Rex egg. There are only two of these left in the world. Each of these bitches four million years old, apiece, son. Goddamn. Crazy. These things are very hard to find and I happen to have both of ‘em…It’s hatchin.’ Oh, shit. Ladies and gentleman, this is a four million-year-old egg. Come on girl, push. Life, life is happening. It’s happenin’ in my home, this is the most ballin’ shit ever!!”

He then takes a pair of scissors and decapitates the baby Rex and drinks from its gushing neck blood. It’s Chappelle at his best. What’s great about Chappelle (and this has been said a thousand times before) is not allowing himself the easy path to the punchline. He is always willing to go out onto the ledge, dangle a foot over (knock the cooling to its screaming death below), lose his balance for a hair’s breath and then strike for the shocking kill. He was never sterile or daffy, just poignant and slightly surreal in his astute observations. Rawlings and Murphy both expressed a rehearsed few lines about not really wanting to be there in Dave’s place. And it was unfair. It was unfair to a man who – in two seasons – rarely miscalculated. This doing, by all of the people he helped make semi-wealthy in their own right, was unkind. It was for my mom. It was for all of the completists out there—the people out there who own all of Nirvana’s great, miraculous studio albums and still went out and bought the rubbish that “With the Lights Out” in 2004. Stupid completists.