Joe Rogan Looks Back on Chappelle's Show - "Dave's a Genius"

So I take the worst, most embarrassing stuff that happens and talk about it because that is, gives you a front row seat at what training the mind actually looks like. And if you can't have a sense of humor about how crazy you are, you are truly fucked. I agree. I think that those uncomfortable moments are so important for other people to hear about, too. Yes, absolutely. We need to know we're not alone with all our madness. What was it like on the set when you were working with Dave Chappelle? It was great. Well, I've known Dave for a long time. I was actually on the very first episode. By chance, I was walking through New York and I saw Dave. And this was before the show had even been a—I didn't even know it existed. But I ran into Bobcat Goldwaite, who's there. And I'm like, what's up, man? What are you guys doing? He's like—he goes, oh, hey, Joe. We're doing a TV sketch, man. You want to be in on it? And I go, I only have like 20 minutes on my way to a meeting. He goes, here. He goes, we're handing out ribbons for New York boobs. And he had a box. So it's me and him walking through Manhattan. And he's got this crazy fake mustache on. He's like, you've got the best New York boobs. And he would give someone like a ribbon for having New York boobs. And it was really silly but fun. And so I was like, well, Dave's got a show. And then, you know, turns out it's the greatest sketch show in the history of the world. And a year later, he calls me up again and asked me to do this thing for—they wanted to do a Fear Factor sketch with Tyrone Biggums. Yeah, so that's me and him. Fresh faced Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. Look at you. Yeah. Well, this is like—what year is this? That's 2003, 2004? Yeah. I think it's before that. Is it? I think it's before that. I want to say it's 2002. Maybe, yeah. Because I wasn't even doing the man show back then. And I was doing that in 2003. So I think it's 2002. The Fear Factor bit is one of my favorites. That's in season two, if I recall. I think so, yeah. And is really one of the funniest— The hilarious. One of the funniest bits in a show that is, I would argue, perhaps the greatest television show of all time. I think it's the greatest sketch comedy show of all time. Yeah. I'm saying something bigger. It's hard to say that, though, because if you boiled down a lot of the all-time great shows, like In Living Color or some of the other ones, they had so many seasons. If you boiled them down to two seasons, maybe there would be some— He's got some sketches that were just groundbreaking, like the black-white supremacist who was blind. Yeah. What about I was watching last night because Jeff and I were talking about it. She fell last night. So on the car ride home from this event we did together, I was watching Black Bush, which was another, I think, unbelievably brilliant sketch. Season two where he plays George W. Bush, his version of George W. Bush, and all the rationales for going into the war in Iraq. And it's unbelievably funny. Yeah. He's a genius. He's a real comedy genius. But also a guy who's—you wouldn't get it if you just sort of see him do stand-up, but he's deeply introspective, like very intensely well thought out. You know, he's not a surface guy by any stretch of the imagination. I love him. I really do. Yeah, I love him, too. It's great. I keep thinking that show's going to come back at some point. I don't even know if that show—his Netflix specials are better. I just like seeing him unfucked with—unless Netflix let him do a Chappelle show where they just left him alone, then it would be genius. So do you think that was the problem in season three? 100% I know it was. They were telling him what to say. They were telling him there was so much money involved that they were trying to get him to slightly water down his content in order to make it more palatable for advertisers. They were asking him does not say the N-word. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes nonsense that I dealt with the exact same administration at Comedy Central, so I'm well aware of how silly they were about certain things. They had these corporate ideas, and this was also right around the same time Janet Jackson's nipple popped out there in the Super Bowl, which fucking, oddly enough, changed everything. People started freaking out about content because of a nipple. It was a very weird time for television. In their defense, what they do is they're producers. They're not creative people. They're executives. And they didn't know how to handle—how to keep it funny and keep it free and loose, but also figure out a way to make it fit into what their corporate structure is of what's acceptable and not acceptable for advertising. So it was just a clusterfuck of control and neediness and too many cooks in the kitchen and people's ego. There's a lot of people that just wanted to affect the show just so that they could put their greasy fingerprints on it. And that's a really common thing with television, that ego aspect of these different people who are high up on the food chain in the executive world wanting to put their stamp on a show and then talking openly about putting their stamp. Well, that was my idea. I thought it was really important. We get Dave out there like that, and for him he was like, fuck this. I'm going to Africa for a couple months, and I'm just going to come back and quit. And everybody was like, whoa. But that's who Dave is. I mean, there's not a lot of people that walk away from $50 million, but he's one of them. He's just like, I don't need to do this. I could do something else. I'll just do stand-up. And in fact, even weirder, he didn't do stand-up for a long time. And when he did it, he did it for free. He would just show up places. He would show up places with a speaker and plug it into a microphone in a park in Seattle and just start doing stand-up. There was a lot of stories of that. People would just gather around, hundreds of people. And he would just be doing stand-up for these random people. And they were like, what's going on? So how does a guy get to be like that? Just be yourself. That's who he is. But do you think is that something, because that sounds to me like somebody who had a practice or something, or an inner compass that was... Smoked a lot of weed. Maybe that was it, but it's like... He smokes weed all day. If you watch his new Netflix special, he's smoking a vape pen through the entire special. To the point where I watched it and in like 40 minutes of the special, I started getting anxiety. I'm like, how high are you right now, man? Well, you said you might... Were you high in your Netflix special? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Because you said at the beginning you were baked, and I was like, is that a bit, or is he... No, I was high. But I didn't keep getting high through the special. Dave keeps hitting that vape pen, and I don't know how strong that vape pen is, but he's like 7, 8, 9, 10 hits deep and 40 minutes in. I'm like, yo, this could get super slippery. Yeah, he just kept pulling out this vape pen. Yeah, I mean, it was literally with him through the entire set in his hand. That's increasing the degree of difficulty to the office that I would not want to explore. That's testing the minds. That's talking about an isolation tank. Yeah. Yeah.