Wayne Brady Got Revenge on ‘Chappelle’s Show’ With the Help of Dave Chappelle
Wayne Brady’s single appearance on Chappelle’s Show brought him a different kind of credibility than a decade’s worth of Whose Line Is It Anyway? ever could. But he hated how he ended up on the show in the first place. It was all a reaction to a sketch in which Paul Mooney played a character who delivered this devastating line: “White people love Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X.”
Up until that point, Brady had been a big fan of Chappelle’s Show. “I was sitting down, getting a haircut, and it came on the TV,” he remembered on A&E’s Right to Offend. “Like, what the hell? What did I do?”
The joke “absolutely offended me,” Brady told IndieWire. “To a degree, it still offends me every time I see some white kid post that on Twitter as a way to get my attention.”
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Mooney’s joke wasn’t funny to Brady, who hated punchlines about Black people not being Black enough. “I’m not just talking about me,” he explained. “I’m talking about folks that get on the bandwagon and hate on our (former) president. I mean the people who get on the bandwagon who hate on Black politicians, Black lawyers — folks that have taken steps to not just succeed in the world, but do so carrying the flag of their race on their back. That’s why a joke like that pisses me off. It’s not just offensive to me, but every single person that tries to make something of themselves.”
Brady didn’t keep his anger to himself. “I ran into a couple of (Chappelle’s) guys,” he said. “I ran into Donnell Rawlings randomly at an event, and he came up and said, ‘Hey, man. I’m a big fan!’ And I was like, ‘You can kiss my ass.’”
Word got back to Dave Chappelle that Brady was angered by the joke. “Dave called me,” Brady remembered. “He said, ‘Oh, man. Paul wrote that joke. I didn’t think it was funny. Look, I’m doing this last big episode. Please come. Let’s write a sketch together.'”
Brady took Chappelle up on the offer, partnering with the comic and writer Neal Brennan on a sketch that served as a stinging response to Mooney’s sideswipe. The resulting Training Day parody, showing Brady to be exactly the opposite of his squeaky clean reputation, was “one of the coolest things I have ever been a part of.”
“That was a moment for me,” Brady explained. “It was incredibly funny, and I love Dave, and I loved doing the show, and I think that for the people that I’ll say in a nice way that were ignorant of my total package, I think it showed them something else that they didn’t know was there.”
Of course, now the comedian has to live with the daily doofuses who approaches him with “Does Wayne Brady have to choke a bitch?” He’ll live with it, for the opportunity to “blow the lid off that joke, because I wanted to get to the heart of the joke,” he said. “That’s why I'm glad I did the sketch because I just wanted to … punch that joke in the mouth.”
