The A.V. Club Interview: D.L. Hughley

Sean O'Neal: Dave Chappelle said one of the reasons he walked away from his show was that he felt it was helping keep stereotypes alive. Do you ever worry that Socially Offensive Behavior—which also mines stereotypes for laughs—is helping propagate stereotypes?

D.L. Hughley: Stereotypes existed hundreds of years before me or Chappelle or BET, and the only way they ever go away is to shine a light on it. There's a distinct difference between observing a joke and becoming one. I think that the greatest people I've ever seen involved in this art form—from George Carlin to Pigmeat Markham to Redd Foxx to Dick Gregory to Lenny Bruce—have all done what we do now, which is take a look at the things around us. I love to push people's buttons and watch people deal with the shit they have in their head.

SO: And now you're being protested for that.

DLH: This isn't the first time this has happened to me, or to comedians. If you look at what happened to Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Redd Foxx, they've all had this happen. This art form survived McCarthyism. It can survive somebody with a mouth and an e-mail page.

SO: Is the title of your new HBO special, Unapologetic, a direct challenge to those protestors?

DLH: Actually, we had the title before this ever even happened, but no, I don't think any person, regardless of what they say, should ever apologize unless they mean it. In the last few years, we've seen people say exactly what they mean, and then some publicist makes them apologize. And I think we pretend to be more offended than we really are. When Mel Gibson made an anti-Semitic remark, he had a number-one movie, and his Q rating went up. Michael Richards made his statement, and sales of Seinfeld went up 70 percent three weeks in a row. Isaiah Washington made an anti-gay slur. Grey's Anatomy has never been stronger. Don Imus, his numbers went through the roof.

The A.V. Club Interview: D.L. Hughley / by Sean O'Neal / 08/14/07