Though you wouldn’t know it walking around south campus on a Saturday night, the genius of Dave Chappelle isn’t his Rick James impersonation.

Nor is it his basketball-playing pancake-serving Prince. Or even his Li’l John – the most relevant caricature for the young, cultured whites who comprise the majority of the Comedy Central audience.

All three are funny and surprisingly accurate. But in the grand Chappelle vision, they seem more like gags – small bones thrown to an audience who can change the channel if things get too straight and heavy for a late Wednesday evening.

It is, after all, Comedy Central, and Chappelle knows it.

He seems to know, too, that a routine of racial humor has to be fresh and catchy. Jokes about blacks, whites and their sometimes tenuous relationships can be heard in almost any new stand-up routine. Such humor is a common stand-up steroid, and the careers of a thousand famous comics – Chris Rock and the Def Comedy Jam vets to name a recent few – have been built solely on the odd habits that define each minority in the public eye.

But standing long, lean and relaxed on stage, Chappelle seems supremely aware of all the easy pitfalls of racial humor, and his genius lies there – in the subtlety of his arguments. Unlike any of his contemporaries or the majority of those who have come before, his best bits poke fun at race rather than racism. They take on not only certain feelings for one category, but the practice of putting people into categories in the first place.

Take for example last season’s sketch about Clayton Bigsby, the black and blind Ku Klux Klan leader, who travels the country lecturing to fellow racists who don’t have the heart to tell him his identity for fear he’d kill himself.

Or this season’s Racial Draft, where three announcers do a play-by-play of races picking bi-racial celebrities to claim all to themselves. Blacks take Tiger Woods. The Asians opt for the Wu-Tang Clan.

In terms of ingenuity, these bits are monumental: Even the most important stand-up social commentators – arguably Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor – felt more comfortable critiquing the evils of racism, not those of race.

When Lenny Bruce did his bit “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties” – where he played an obtuse white suburbanite fumbling over himself opposite a black servant – he was proving how useless current racial stereotypes were. He didn’t question the act of stereotyping as much as the stereotypes themselves. In reality, when he romanticized the hip black lifestyle and tried to delve into it, he made his own crude stereotypes.

Even with an act more creative and controversial than almost any before him, Richard Pryor found superstardom by criticizing racism, not race. His soft, low-toned white cop voice was right on, as was his bit about putting a black priest in “The Exorcist.” And his tirades against the laws that tormented him were conscious of how much color still mattered in a country claiming to be the land of equal opportunity.

But when he stood smoking and sad-eyed in front of audiences, his act was predicated on a feeling that the boundaries of race were insurmountable, at least within the systems in place in 1970s America.

Chappelle, however, has not taken these boundaries for granted. Like most comics, he knows they are inadequate. And when he is on, he tears up the categories, puts them back together in bizarre ways and shows audiences across the country how ridiculous and subjective the situations were in the first place.

Like the first records of Funkadelic, Sly Stone and James Brown, Chappelle’s hilarity is a fresh new dialect in racial politics – a new way or arguing for an old cause.

Maybe this time enough people are listening.

John Ross is a senior in English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].