First, what you’ve all been waiting for: Former director of the ‘Chappelle’s Show,’ Rusty Cundieff, is 99.999 percent sure Dave Chappelle will not return to his acclaimed Comedy Central series for a third season.

About five episodes worth of skits have been shot, Cundieff said, but when they air, ‘Dave will have absolutely nothing to do with it.’

Cundieff spoke Thursday night at the second ‘Conversation on Race and Film’ in Newhouse II to approximately 150 people about the entertainment industry, race and comedy. The actor/director who is best known for his days on ‘Chappelle’s Show’ talked little about the series. The comedian’s name was not mentioned until 54 minutes in, when a member of the audience asked about the show.

That’s not to say Cundieff is bitter the series came to an end shortly after Chappelle signed a two-year, $50 million contract in 2004.

‘Chappelle was great,’ Cundieff said. ‘(The series) affected me in many ways. Dave is a comedic genius, and very few people could pull off the skits he did. I wouldn’t have directed most of the skits he turned in if they hadn’t come from Dave.’

The conversation, which took place between Cundieff and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications professor Richard Dubin, discussed Cundieff’s career in Hollywood, in particular racial segregation and racial comedy. Dubin said he brought Cundieff, a friend and former television colleague, to speak at Newhouse almost exclusively because of HillTV’s ‘Over the Hill’ show in the fall of 2004.

Last semester when the show’s racially insensitive skits were publicized, some of Dubin’s students involved with the show asked him how to make things right. To educate them, Dubin helped arrange Cundieff’s time on campus this week.

‘I think they learned that race is not stuff to toy with,’ Dubin said. ‘They were very apologetic after it happened, but I don’t think they had sense to deal with it, and they really weren’t funny.’

Dubin said he knows they’ve learned from the reaction since, and they learned more last night.

‘They weren’t extraordinarily flawed people,’ Dubin said. ‘They just made a mistake.

‘(They’ve learned) not to do that type of stuff if they’re not equipped to do it.’

Cundieff agreed that race-involved comedy has to be personal. He said what made Chappelle and other black comedians like Richard Pryor successful is that their satire and skits were real and life-inspired, making it almost impossible to duplicate.

‘People come up to me and say, ‘Dave is so funny. I want to be like him,” Cundieff said. ‘And I say no you don’t because his life is fucked up. To be funny like that, you can’t be normal, because then you don’t have the personal experiences to be funny.’

Instead of trying to force yourself into a life of comedy, Cundieff cautioned against necessarily doing what you want to do for a living. He said one should find what he or she is good at and make it that way.

Cundieff, who early on was a stand-up comedian, found his life just wasn’t interesting enough to make a living on the road. Instead he found his talent as a writer and has found success that way.

‘You gotta figure out what your thing is and go after it,’ Cundieff said.

As for ‘Chappelle’s Show,’ which Chappelle left in part because he was afraid it was perpetuating stereotypes, Cundieff said he was never afraid of that. He mentioned the popular ’70s series ‘All in the Family’ as an example of a show that dealt with stereotypes, but did not further them.

‘Everyone asked, ‘Are people laughing with Archie Bunker or at him?” Cundieff said. ‘People have liked stuff that I’ve written in ways I never intended, too.’

Amber Flournoy, a media management master’s student, agreed ‘Chappelle’s Show’ didn’t cross the line.

‘When I saw the first few episodes, I thought they were airing (black people’s) dirty laundry,’ she said. ‘I was wondering what white people got out of it. But as the seasons progressed, you see it was just showing how stupid these stereotypes are.’

As for Cundieff, he is currently working on an HBO pilot with Rob Reiner titled ‘Not a Genuine Black Man.’ He says it evaluates what it means to be black.

But as many students wished to know, ‘Chappelle’s Show’ is all but dead. Cundieff said to expect Chappelle’s usual brilliant material when the skits show later this year on Comedy Central. And, as usual, they are skits only Dave Chappelle could write.

‘There’s one where black people play monsters,’ Cundieff said. ‘Dave is a werewolf and Charlie Murphy is Frankenstein. They walk around and they don’t know if people are fucking with them because they are black or because they are monsters.’

Published on March 30, 2006 at 12:00 pm