The first thing I did when I got to Yellow Springs, Ohio, population 3,665, in August 2005 was make a deal with the kids who lorded over the pile of skateboards, cell phones, plastic bags, and Hold ’Em cards on the corner outside Dino’s Cappuccinos. From the 50 percent they’d been asking I negotiated them down to 10—they called them “points”—of the $2-a-word cover story I had been, technically, assigned. The fee was, I said, crossing my fingers behind my back, strictly a “finder’s fee”—it wasn’t like I would be paying for an interview, since the kids seemed to have zero insight into what had made the most recognizable resident of the state, television-star-in-exile Dave Chappelle, leave a $50 million deal and everything, as my editor had put it, “he’d chased his whole life.”

      Was he crazy? I asked. Well, yes, but he was crazier for listening to that whack-ass non-commercial hip-hop he’d been blasting from his Toyota. Hahahahahahahahaha.

      And his sister Felicia, she used to teach them drama classes, but now she didn’t, and also she had begun wearing a Muslim head scarf, no word on whether the two of those things were related either. Hahahahahahahahaha.

      Yellow Springs likes to smoke weed. A kid on my plane to Dayton, a kid who lived two hours away in Kentucky, had advised me as much about Yellow Springs, and how I might order a high-inducing pizza here. Beyond smoking, Yellow Springs also likes to do yoga, don tie-dye, dance like the white people in that one sketch with John Mayer (although you could see how that had gotten a little played out at this point), bike through the nature reserve, Tivo Six Feet Under, and participate in online political activism, even though everyone in the Yellow Springs branch of any online campaign here undoubtedly sees one another twice a day at Dino’s.

      Dino’s was the unofficial headquarters of Operation Chappelle. It was at Dino’s, to the sounds of M.I.A.’s “Bucky Done Gone,” that I learned that Antioch University, the big employer in Yellow Springs, had been at the forefront of the civil rights movement, which made the town improbably diverse and strangely conflicted over race and politics. The whites had, it turned out, organized a Mumia Abu-Jamal rally; the blacks disapproved of Mumia and didn’t want to get involved. This was about as heated as tensions get in Yellow Springs, which is as lovely a place one can raise kids who still retain the right to complain of nothing to do. Dave’s late father, an Antioch music professor, had co-founded an institute to combat racism, which as a kid Dave found profoundly pointless in a place like Yellow Springs. At 14 Dave moved from here to his mom’s house in D.C., which had the same relationship to crack as Yellow Springs did to weed, and within a year he was performing at the Comedy Cellar, wooing D.C. crowds and telling D.C. jokes. He didn’t think too much of Yellow Springs in those years, except to make fun of it or occasionally make fun of his own interactions in it.

      In general Dave told people he was from D.C. because he felt he had earned that. While his alpha classmates risked their lives stupidly selling crack, Dave deliberately put his dignity on the line every night in front of the hard old-heads of the comedy business. He bombed once, at the Apollo in Harlem, and took an apprenticeship with the Washington Square street comedian Charlie Barnett, and by the time he was 18 he had earned the right to forget Yellow Springs forever.

      Ten years later, though, Dave returned and, to his own surprise, kind of liked the place. It was weird and peculiar and, in its way, understood him. His father was dying, and his television career sat stalled in meetings over the inclusion of additional white cast members. He was 28, twice the age at which he’d started doing stand-up, and the old singularity of purpose was gone; in fact, he had begun to suspect it had never been there in the first place. So he fired his manager Barry Katz, the former owner of Boston Comedy Club (which is actually in New York City), and took up with the former Boston doorman Neal Brennan, the youngest of 10 Irish-Catholic Philly kids who suffered fools even less charitably than Dave. And he bought a house on a farm and called it the “Fuck Hollywood House.” Every day at the Fuck Hollywood House he’d drive to Dino’s for his coffee and the New York Times and to smoke American Spirits in the back. Some days he and his wife Elaine would have beers at the adjacent Ye Olde Trail Tavern. The day I showed up in Yellow Springs, they appeared to be strolling aimlessly down Xenia Boulevard, bathed in sunlight. 

      “He’s here!” the black kid from Cincinnati, the group’s lead negotiator, hissed. 

      “I’m kind of trying to avoid the media right now,” he said, after bumming a cigarette. “I mean, that’s sort of the whole point.”