What We Learned From Dave Chappelle's "GQ" Men of the Year Interview

Image via @animalnewyork on Twitter

GQ has placed Dave Chappelle on the cover of its annual "Men of the Year" issue, ostensibly making the comedian the "man of the year." Chappelle, of course, is coming off a red-hot run at Radio City Music Hall earlier this year in which he sold out every. single. show, and had all types of celebrity guests.

The magazine is on newsstands now. Here are five quick takeaways from Chappelle's interview: 

He probably bought weed from Idris Elba, who, according to the interviewer, said he used to sell weed at NYC comedy club Carolines back in the day. 

"Oh, okay. So he used to work at Carolines. During that era of my life, there's a high possibility that I bought reefer from Idris. Fast-forward to when I was doing Chappelle's Show, Idris would come by set sometimes ... There's a lot of women who used to work on the show ... all very professional, with the single exception when Idris would come around ... [They] would just lose their goddamn minds."

He sees Kanye West's point about the paparazzi, sort of. When the interviewer asked Chappelle how he felt about Kanye comparing the paparazzi struggle to the civil rights struggle in GQ earlier this year, Chappelle responded: 

"Well, okay now, I don't know about that. But I do see a common denominator in the sense that the issue of privacy in general is everyone's issue ...  If someone sits there and stares at you while you eat, you wont' even eat the way you normally do, because it'll make you uncomfortable. If I look at my dog while he's eating, he will look at me like, 'Dave, I will bite you. What are you looking at? I'm trying to eat.' It's something that dehumanizes a person, being on display like that."

His next move might be to go all Easy Rider, but not, like, as a work thing. Just remember to "bring your own meat."

"I have all these weird fantasies. Going coast-to-coast on my motorcycle and having random barbecues all over America. No show, no nothing ... Sometimes I just like not doing shit and not being shit."

He got no love from Rob Ford. Chappelle always smokes cigarettes while he's performing stand-up, but it's banned by a citywide ordinance in Toronto, so he went straight to the mayor's office looking for help.

"[Ford] walked in and was like 'What can I do for you?' And I told him, 'These ordinances exist in the United States but they're often waived in contexts of performance, because it's an integral part of what I do ... Then he told me 'I'm sorry, I can't help you. The laws of Toronto are the same for everybody ... we can't change the law because it disagrees with you.' He really gave me this whole speech. I should have said, 'You didn't let me finish: smoke crack rocks onstage!' Maybe a year after that was his first scandal. 

He still wants to do something. But his recent slew  of sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall did have the "connotation of a sunset." 

"There was something very definitive about it. In other words, for me to leave [Chappelle's Show] the way I did and then to sell, like 60,000 tickets in New York City is a pretty big deal ... So if it was the end of something, it would definitively be the end of any doubt that there was something real between me and the audience of people. ... I'll say it like this: There's still some shit on the list. I still got some shit on my bucket list."