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5,067 words · no email, no account
No. 113 · Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
The Fifty Million Dollar Man
a biography of David Khari Webber Chappelle
What the book is
On a soundstage in Los Angeles, in the spring of 2005, a thirty-one-year-old comedian stopped showing up. The contract on the table was worth fifty million dollars. The show, in its third season, was the most quoted on American television. He boarded a plane to South Africa instead, and when he came home, he came home to Yellow Springs, Ohio — population three thousand, the town where he had grown up watching his father teach music at Antioch College.
He did not explain. Not then. The explanation arrived, when it arrived at all, in fragments: a Tavis Smiley interview, a series of late-night sets at the Comedy Cellar, a return to the road, a deal with Netflix, a special called The Closer, and the long argument that followed it.
Donovan Hadley traces the education of a comedian — from the professors' house in Washington, D.C., where dinner-table conversation was Baldwin and Baraka; to the open mics he worked at fourteen, child of a divorce and a city in crack-era collapse; to Def Comedy Jam at nineteen; to the sketch show that made him a millionaire and something he had not bargained for.
What does it cost to be the funniest person in the room? What does it cost to leave the room? Hadley's portrait is patient, archival, and unwilling to settle the question on anyone's behalf.
At a glance
- Subject
- David Khari Webber Chappelle
- Shelf
- Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
- Written by
- Donovan Hadley
- Chapters
- 18 across 200 pages
- Narrated by
- Desmond Vale
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Professor's SonRead free
- 02Yellow Springs3,085 words
- 03The Education of a Comedian3,283 words
- 04The First Open Mic3,317 words
- 05New York3,466 words
- 06Def Comedy Jam2,956 words
- 07Hollywood, Half Baked3,486 words
- 08The Voice2,959 words
- 09Chappelle's Show2,977 words
- 10Fifty Million Dollars3,905 words
- 11Africa and Silence2,802 words
- 12The Wilderness2,804 words
- 13The Return2,855 words
- 14The Closer3,675 words
- 15The Attack3,060 words
- 16The Grammy and the Recognition3,304 words
- 17Yellow Springs and the GOAT3,537 words
- 18What Chappelle Means3,824 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 200 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 200 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-048-5 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale
ISBN 979-8-90623-029-4
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Fifty Million Dollar Man about?
David Khari Webber Chappelle. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Fifty Million Dollar Man — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,067 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 200 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
