Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images

This article originally appeared in Vulture.

"When I'm onstage, I get real happy up there. Maybe that's the only time in my adult life that I feel like myself. You're standing up there—you know what I mean—like a gladiator, and them lights is on you, and you look down and everyone's looking up at you ... and it's all these smiles around you. And they get dressed and they put perfume on and stuff, and they're going to see your show. That feels good, man. These people, you know, they love you. Even if it's for a minute, they really do. They love you, man. You know, it's like a love-fest ... It's the best feeling, man. I love stand-up." – Dave Chappelle, Inside the Actor's Studio, 2006

The lights go dark. A giant silhouette of Dave Chappelle appears onstage. The curtain drops, and all you see is a puff of smoke. Wearing a slim black two-button suit, he tells the crowd, who collectively decided to giving him a standing ovation before he said a word, to sit down, to relax. "This is a very special night," he says before launching into his first joke. "You know what I feel like, being in New York this week? Like a motherfucker who's been locked up for a decade." He pauses there, puffs his American Spirit, and lets the laughter settle a little. "People see me like, 'Damn, nigga, you got swole. How have you been, baby boy?' Pretty good! Pretty fucking good." The crowd erupts in approval.

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This is why he quit Chappelle's Show. This is why he walked away from $50 million nine years ago. This is why he went to Africa. This is why he went silent, kept silent, and lived on a farm in Ohio. This is why he'd only reappear occasionally to perform poorly reviewed, loose, meandering sets of essentially shooting the shit. This is why, 10 months ago, he stopped a performance in Hartford and just quietly read his book onstage. It wasn't because he was crazy or on drugs or any of the myriad reasons people who aren't Dave Chappelle liked to say. He quit so he could eventually come back and perform a show like the one he did last night, at Radio City Music Hall, in front of 6,000 deferential, diverse, well-dressed fans.

When I enter, I'm instantly and surprisingly overwhelmed with emotion. With a jazz trio called Supa Lowery Bros at the top of the stairs, playing an instrumental version of Kendrick Lamar's oddly appropriate "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe," I'm taken by how incredibly eclectic and buzzing the crowd is. I'm not exaggerating when I say it is the most diverse room I've ever been in. It looks like the streets of New York City were moved inside. It looks like the cast of Orange Is the New Black if it were half male and everyone were allowed to wear their cutest outfits (and not just because I eventually sat two seats down from Natasha Lyonne). A young Asian guy wearing a hat with the New Yorker logo on it stands in line in front of a white guy in a Twiztid hat, an Indian guy in a suit, an African-American skater in a Obey hat, and a woman in dreads who was talking to a woman with a feather in her hair. This is why Chappelle's run of ten shows needed to be here, at Radio City. It's big enough that I could see how wide-reaching his fan base is, but not so big (like Madison Square Garden would've been) that we turned into a faceless blob just moving in and out of passageways. With the band now playing a jazzed-up version of a Kanye West song, it is all reminiscent of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Chappelle's 2006 concert documentary, which the comedian called the "best day of my career."

The vibe continues inside Radio City's massive auditorium, where a DJ spins a mix of neo-soul, old-school hip-hop, and random nostalgia hat-tips. Everyone knows every word of Biggie's "Juicy" and the Cheers theme song. This is the first of the five shows Chappelle added after the first five sold out. Unlike on the previous nights, Chappelle splits the bill with a musician. In this case, Nas. Though Chappelle goes on first, don't be fooled. It is his show.

Because he has a musician follow him, Chappelle's one-hour-and-change set differs from the 90-minute ones that many publications reviewed last week. It's a tight set. It is hour