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In 2005, Dave Chappelle was merely the hottest comedian in America. Then he left his job and became a far more singular cultural figure: A renegade to some, a lunatic to others, but most of all, an enigma.

Now he is making a kind of comeback - Mr. Chappelle headlines the Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival, a new 15-city tour produced by the Funny or Die Web site - and what makes it particularly exciting is how he's using his hard-earned mystique to make more daring and personal art.

Mr. Chappelle didn't just walk away from a $50 million contract and the acclaimed "Chappelle's Show" on Comedy Central whose second season stacks up well against the finest years of "SCTV," "Saturday Night Live" and Monty Python.

He did so dramatically, fleeing to South Africa and explaining his exit in moral terms: "I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling," he told Time magazine. Since then, he has been a remote star in an era when comedians have never been more accessible.

Mr. Chappelle hasn't done any recent interviews (aside from a radio appearance in 2011) or appeared on podcasts or talk shows. He doesn't even have a Web site.

But Mr. Chappelle has tiptoed back into the public eye over the last year. While he has stayed away from movies and television, he still drops in pretty often on comedy clubs and occasionally theaters, usually in surprise appearances that generate more rumors of a comeback. Beyond the Oddball Festival, Chris Rock has said Mr. Chappelle may join him on his stand-up tour next year.

There has been an increased urgency in his comedy this summer. A show in San Francisco in March was charismatic if chaotic: freewheeling, improvisational and full of crowd work. But by June, his act was very different: polished, thematically unified, less work-in-practice.

His characteristic laid-back delivery and pinpoint timing were in service of jokes that were more dark, intricate and revelatory than his stand-up from a decade ago. Seeing Mr. Chappelle evolve onstage was a reminder that he didn't leave comedy so much as return home to the live form he has practiced for a quarter-century. He might have left television, but that departure has become the wellspring of his comedy now. He only needs a microphone and a stage to lay claim to greatness.

When Mr. Chappelle walked onstage for the first of two shows in Richmond, Virginia, in June, he appeared frazzled. "I almost didn't make it," he said, explaining that he showed up at the airport before buying a ticket. "I didn't plan," he said, adding that he "used to have people" do that. "Now, not as many people do."

Mr. Chappelle has always introduced jokes with a deceptively offhand style, establishing a connection with his listeners while also teasing them. Sidling up to the audience with the soft-spoken warmth of an old friend, he likes to stop midsentence to confess he probably shouldn't go on, or look around conspiratorially as if he is about to divulge a secret.

But as his public profile has changed, he ingratiates in new ways. An eccentric who lost the spotlight, Mr. Chappelle presents himself as melancholy, a little in turmoil. He begins jokes by putting you inside his tortured mind.

"I'm in one of those bad moods," he said at the top of one story. In something of a topic sentence of his new act, he rubbed his bald head, worrying he no longer had a message to relate. Then Mr. Chappelle froze, holding out his newly muscled arms with his palms up as if he had hit on an epiphany. "Maybe my message is one of hopelessness," he said.

Mr. Chappelle isn't all gloom and doom. He still earns consistent laughs but the most explosive ones build off this sober mood. Mr. Chappelle has always been deft at this two-step. In his last stand-up special, "For What It's Worth," from 2004 on Showtime, he described going to a high school to tell students that the only way to get out of the ghetto was to focus and stop blaming white people. Then he strategically stammered before leaning into the joke:

"And you've got to learn how to rap or play basketball or something," he said. "Either do that or sell crack."

What's changed since that special is that his jokes now always seem to circle back to his infamous exit from Comedy Central, explicitly or, more often, implicitly. For instance, Mr. Chappelle acts out a joke that comes off like an elaborate multi-act play about how his son, following his advice, left an after-school program he didn't like. "Son, sometimes, it's O.K. to quit," was the title he coined for his parental lecture.

In early 2006, Mr. Chappelle did interviews on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Inside the Actors Studio" and told a story about the struggle to be free in Hollywood. "I'm going to find a way to be myself," he said on the latter show.

His tone now is less defiant, occasionally even contrite. Instead of explaining himself, he dramatizes his own confusion, then makes it funny.

In one story, after struggling to come up with some life advice to give students, he settles on: "Don't quit your show."

The New York TImes

(China Daily 08/25/2013 page12)