Originally posted Monday, July 16, 2018 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
The great thing about going to a small comedy club is that sometimes you just might get to see an A-list comic.
For a select 80 people, that's what happened last Saturday night at Midtown's Laughing Skull Lounge: Dave Chappelle popped in at 12:30 a.m. and cracked jokes for a whopping two and a half hours until 3 a.m.
Owner Marshall Chiles was out of the country on vacation and missed out on all the fun but he said he heard Chappelle was visiting his friend and rap legend T.I.
“Nobody knew he was coming from the audience,” Chiles said. “It wasn’t a traditional set. He just did a lot of talking. The audience was on the edge of their seat the entire time.”
Chappelle sold out 12 Tabernacle shows in 2017. (Read my review from one of those shows.) The comic could easily fill Philips Arena if he wanted to but he prefers smaller venues.
The Laughing Skull Lounge, which opened about a decade ago, has had its fair share of big names show up. The biggest is Robin Williams in 2013, a year before he committed suicide.
Locals Ron White and Chris Tucker regularly test out material there. One time Zach Galifianakis showed up and had to show his ID to the door man to convince him he was who he was. Other big-name comics who have swung by include Bill Burr, Amy Schumer, Katt Williams and George Wallace.
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