A Closer Look at....Dave Chappelle

The 411: Dave Chappelle’s hourlong stand-up comedy special “Killin’ Them Softly” Saturday at 11 p.m. on HBO.

Who’s Who: Written by Chappelle. Directed by Stan Lathan. Executive producers Chappelle, Michael Rotenberg, Lathan and Howard Klein and producer Kimber Rickabaugh.

Get a Clue: Chappelle, 26, says he started doing stand-up in his native Washington, D.C., at the tender age of 14; he eventually rose to prominence in New York nightclubs and as part of the “Def Comedy Jam” scene. Chappelle’s experiences developing sitcom pilots culminated in a public blowup with Fox, in 1998, when Chappelle accused the network of racism for insisting he add more white cast members to a planned series. Since then, Chappelle’s career has segued between film roles and stand-up, where his incisive take on race is perhaps best glimpsed in a bit about calling the police to his home after a break-in: Seeing that Chappelle is black, the police figure he’s the perpetrator--and that he’s managed to hang pictures of his family on all the walls.

The Past: Co-starred in the 1996 ABC sitcom “Buddies”; film roles in “Con Air,” “Blue Streak,” “The Nutty Professor.”

The Future: Chappelle’s developing a feature film called “King of the Park,” based on the late Charlie Barnett, a street comic Chappelle worked with in New York’s Washington Square Park.

Pause for Thought: “I notice all black people seem to laugh a little harder. That’s a very racist thing for me to say, but we laugh from a different place. Literally. We laugh from our belly as opposed to our throat. It’s like a physical laugh. A black crowd, when they laugh, they rock, like a wave. It’s more exciting. . . . [But] all audiences have this thing where they don’t listen the same. You know how people, go, ‘ooooh,’ instead of laughing now? It’s a weird thing, man. It’s like people don’t know how to be an audience in the same way. They’re just learning. Steve Martin said that’s what drove him out of comedy--crazy crowds, man. You listen to a Richard Pryor record, [that’s] when audiences listened. It was more a mark of the time. They didn’t have 500 channels, they didn’t have the Internet. They could laugh like nobody was watching them. It was more intimate.”