“I have a confession to make. The show might not be funny tonight.” Not exactly what one wants to hear out of a comedian’s mouth at the start of their set. Especially when the comedian is as unpredictable as Dave Chappelle. This is a guy who will perform an absolutely genius comedic set one evening, only to walk off the stage minutes into the next evening. He’s been known to lash out at critics, fans and hecklers. When things get real bad, he might not only leave the venue, he will remove himself from the entire continent. There are many words that can describe Dave Chappelle, but consistent is not one of them. So when he followed those opening words with the punchline, “It’s yo own city’s fault. Weed on every goddamned corner. I couldn’t walk away.“, a certain level of relief washed over the crowd. When a fan walked right up to the stage and handed him a joint, his reaction assured us that he was going to celebrate his 41st birthday in good humor. Where a certain Chappelle would have flipped out on security for allowing someone to walk up to the stage, he took the opportunity to throw in one of the many off-the-cuff jokes of the night. “Way to go security, just let them come right up here and stab me or whatever the fuck. Suge Knight got shot six times last night and muthafuckas just walkin’ up and handin’ me weed?”

There was a lot of confusion surrounding last night’s show. First off, we were kept in the dark about who the special guests would be. Chappelle decided to extend his birthday bash to include a second show at the Boulder Theater with Common, but nothing had been announced about who would be joining him at Red Rocks. So when DJ Trauma announced the first guest as the Colorado Springs-based Chris Fonseca, I was a little surprised. Fonseca is a wheelchair-bound comedian who suffers from cerebral palsy and has a speech impediment, which made him an odd choice to play such a large stage. But once I got past the initial shock, his ten minute set was hilarious. Most of his material was based around his medical condition, but being Mexican helped out as well. One bit that stood out was a theory that white people invented Cinco de Mayo so they could get all the Mexicans out of their houses. Then they could break in and steal all their shit……back. Being a Colorado native, he was able to throw some local flavor in as well, like when he apologized to the people from Commerce City — “I’m sorry, I can’t speak any slower“.

Josh Blue was up next. And although he was not wheelchair-bound, the Last Comic Standing winner also suffers from cerebral palsy, so he introduced himself as Fonseca’s son, before assuring us that Chappelle would be out as soon as this Make-A-Wish shit was over. Blue’s set focused mainly on his physical disabilities, but delved into his interracial marriage quite a bit as well.

Donnell Rawlings was the last of the openers, and his set was very inline with what Chappelle would bring next — race and sex. I only knew Rawlings as Clay Davis’ driver in The Wire, so I wasn’t all that familiar with his résumé, but his set didn’t do much for me. The whole bit about white bitches is all I really remember. He used to have jungle fever, so he would put on a baseball cap, a Bruce Springsteen shirt, and camo shorts before going to the Farmer’s market. He’d have a Pilates ball and a yoga mat and a recycled bag made out of recycled bags that were just recycled. He’d fill the bag with kale and lots of glutton-free shit, because white bitches love kale and glutton-free shit. “I didn’t even know what glutton was…I’m like ‘Glutton free? How long that nigga been locked up?’” Yeah, you get the point.

If these comedians were supposed to get the crowd warmed up, any momentum they had gained was lost during the half hour it took to raise the curtain on Chappelle’s stage. The curtain only made me more curious about what musical act might be opening, so it was kind of a let-down when DJ Trauma went through the rules (again!) before introducing the birthday boy. The curtain dropped on a simple stage with a solitary man and a microphone –“Alright everybody, take a look, 41-year-old Dave Chappelle everybody” — proving the curtain, and the effort to hang it, completely unnecessary.

Reviewing a comedy show is a bit tricky. Anyone who is going to see Chappelle perform in the near-future will not want the punchlines spoiled. And I’m sure a recording of these shows will be made available sometime soon. So I’ll try to capture the essence of the performance without exposing too many details of the plot. First off, Chappelle wore blue jeans and a black shirt. He looked good. Not crackhead skinny and not overweight. He chain-smoked American Spirits through the entire set. He paced the stage, gave everyone a little attention, and perched his foot on a monitor to rest his legs every so often. He was crystal clear from the 10th row, as I’m sure he was from the 60th row. It was a perfectly still night, with no wind or rain. He didn’t have water on stage, like so many comedians do, but he did ask for a European beer at one point in the night (“American beers taste like racist juice”). They brought him a Stella and he nursed it through the set. He never once mentioned Robin Williams.

The format of the performance went something like this:

• Colorado Weed Laws
• Colorado Elevation and (lack of) Diversity
• Drugs (“coke bitches” vs. “weed bitches“)
• Barrack Obama (“the first not completely white President“)
• Homophobia (scared vs. not wanting to “have to explain why I’m talking to a guy with titty balls“)
• Pussy
• Technical Master of Comedy
• Wife / Family / Dog
• Masturbation
• Hecklers (“what I call weed heckles….complete non sequiturs…they don’t even make sense“)
• Racial Tensions (“…here’s the thing champ, Ferguson is hard for people in Denver to understand“)
• Donald Sterling (“must be really racist…can’t see past that black skin and see all that AIDS“)
• Being a Missing Celebrity (“I’m leaving the country for a little while…see how this police shit pans out“)
• Drug Dealers with Dreams
• Colorado Weed Laws Revisited

Some of the topics were hilarious. Some of the topics went on for way too long. And some of the topics went off the rails and never came back. But it was the unplanned stuff that made me laugh the hardest. At one point in the night a weird sound came from backstage. It sounded like a fog horn and it interrupted a bit about Donald Sterling that was going downhill fast. “What was that? Is my boat here? That’s how hard I’m ballin’. I got a boat picking me up in Denver.” The hecklers also provided some good material. Last time Chappelle played Colorado he used them as an excuse to cut his set short. This time he dealt with them a lot better. “I am getting heckled by motherfuckers with my own jokes. Man, that’s fucking annoying. [looks directly at heckler in front row] This is not television, I can see you and hear you in real life.”

There were times you could tell he wanted to go off — on the hecklers, about Ferguson, etc., but he kept it cool. There were no disasters. It was a good (not great) performance throughout, but then came the weak bit about Martin Luther King, Jr. as a hippie, which ended the set on a flat note. And that’s when things got weird.

Chappelle decided to have his birthday/after-party on the stage at Red Rocks and we were all invited to stay. The DJ booth was rolled out, his family and friends flooded the stage, and laser lights were projected on the crowd. A cake was provided and a guy with a harmonica played “Happy Birthday”. Everything from 70’s rock, to 80’s pop, to 90’s hip-hop were piped out onto a somewhat confused crowd, while people took selfies with Chappelle on stage. After 10 minutes or so, people started leaving, but many stayed in place — like myself, they were waiting for something to happen. It was about a half hour later when Biz Markie started calling for Dave, only to realize he wasn’t even on the stage anymore. When he finally came out, “Just A Friend” was performed, and then it turned into a reggae party.

The rain came down around 11:00pm, and at that point I felt like we were just hanging around a party we weren’t invited to. It was strange. Chappelle mentioned that he wanted to spend his birthday at Red Rocks, but he didn’t know enough people in Denver, so he booked the show to make people show up. It was meant as a joke (I think), but that is how it felt at the end. Why pay $100K to throw party at Red Rocks when you can have the attendees pay for it? Sure, he had to perform a quick hour of comedy, but it was well worth the accommodations. The last song of the night sounded like it came from some children’s television show, and I’m guessing there was some inside joke that made that appropriate, but we weren’t in on it. Chappelle made a confession at the beginning of his set — he said the show might not be funny. He was wrong, there were a lot of funny things about the show, I’m just not 100% convinced that the biggest joke of the night wasn’t on us.