The article (Reg. req.) in today’s New York Times, written on the occasion of Chappelle/Chapelle’s appearance a the recent HBO fest in Vegas, recaps the careerus interruptus of Comedy Central’s erstwhile cash cow on its first cyberpage. Then reporter Dave Itzkoff can’t help himself, only waiting until paragraph 11 to drop the cliche of all cliches:

But another confidant, the rapper David Banner, wondered if Mr. Chappelle might still be struggling with the consequences of his drastic professional choices. “He looked better than he ever looked to me,” said Mr. Banner, who appeared with Mr. Chappelle in a series of Hurricane Katrina benefits. “But he’s the one who decides whether he can look at himself in the daytime. The one thing you have to understand about comedians is, the more they make people smile, the more pain that they usually feel inside.”

At this point, we stopped reading. (The glass on the front of the credibility meter shatters; the needle dips way below zero, then falls off, hitting the floor with a faint tinkle.)

Note to Messrs. Banner and Itzkoff: It’s when the crowd is not smiling that we feel pain. How many times do we have to repeat this? Check your hackneyed faux Freudian nonsense at the door and throw away the ticket!

But then, we couldn’t resist. What other nuggets might the NYT’s intrepid reporter uncover, wittingly or unwittingly? We click further:

At the Mesa Grill restaurant in Caesars Palace, at least one veteran comedian was still skeptical that the concert would happen at all. “I think the greatest thing he could do is not show up,” said George Wallace, a former writer for The Redd Foxx Show. “Wouldn’t that be something? It’d be the greatest press he ever got.”

Well, at least George Wallace gets it. Chappelle/Chapelle knew damn well that bugging out of his TV show would be rough for a news cycle or two, but that, eventually, he’d be bigger than anyone out there; bigger than Comedy Central itself. (Of course Wallace gets it– he’s got a degree in marketing. If Chappelle/Chapelle doesn’t have his own degree in marketing, he could now obtain one from any of the finest schools in the land– an honorary one for pulling off what might be the greatest marketing stunt of all time, disappearing on April 28 and sending the media into a frenzy.)

Talent manager Jason Steinberg summed up the comedian’s current predicament thusly: “He could say, ‘All right, I’m going to play tonight in San Francisco,’ and it will sell out that moment. To decide that and know the place will be full of fans coming to see you, it’s such a powerful thing.” Powerful indeed.

What Chappelle did was akin to dying and coming back to life. He will enjoy a status that very few living comics enjoy because of it. He assumes a “largeness” among contemporary comics that is normally only reserved for the likes of Kinison, Hicks, Lenny Bruce or Hedberg– comics who die, accidentally or otherwise– only he’ll be around to enjoy it. Cynical? Maybe. But he no doubt did some calculation and figured that, not only would he survive blowing off Comedy Central and Big Television, but that he’d thrive. None of the coverage of Chappelle’s maneuvers ever gave him any credit for perhaps knowing exactly what he was doing. And, it seems, some still prefer to view the whole affair in mythical terms. We prefer to look at it like George Wallace undoubtedly does.