How I got US icon Dave Chappelle to perform in Nairobi

Chappelle had insisted that only 100 attend, but Eric Lu Savali, the organiser of the show, persuaded the star to allow a few more heads in.

“He (Dave) only wanted 100 fans for the show – just a small crowd – because he wanted to have an intimate show with only those who appreciate the craft. He wasn’t doing it for the money, he was doing it for the love of the craft. Why would he come out here for that? Anyone who has studied Dave's discography knows that he is already self-made,” Lu Savali says.

Lu Savali is not just an event organiser; he is a physicist who loves comedy and founded the popular Punchline Comedy Club. 

We spoke to him after he and his family had returned to Nairobi from the US, where he had accepted an invitation from Chappelle.

But how did Lu Savali get here such a big artiste here? 

How he got the attention of a star considered one the greatest comics of all time is almost a fairy tale.  

Few believed it when it was announced that the comic was going to perform in Nairobi. And they had reason to, as the event was lowkey and almost exclusive.

Lu Savali says Chappelle performed in Kenya because he wanted to -- not because he was keen to make money out of it, otherwise why insist on only 100 people for the show?

From Nairobi, the star visited Rwanda, where he met with President Paul Kagame and performed at a sold-out event where tickets were more than twice the rate in Kenya, Rwf200,000 ($144).

Details of his meeting with President Kagame remain scanty as Chappelle is known to keep his projects and life under wraps.

But word is that the visit to Rwanda and meeting with President Kagame wasn’t about comedy; there are projects that the comic is raring to set up in that country.

“About Dave and what he was doing during this tour, there are things I can speak about and those that I can’t. What I can say is that Dave performing in Kenya wasn’t a one-time thing. Our partnership with him is not a one-time thing, I just came back from the US on his invitation and so there is more to come,” Lu Savali said.

For a man of Chappelle’s stature, it’s not every day that you get his attention or audience. For Lu Savali, it took eight years of constant efforts to reach the legend.

“When I started comedy in 2017, in my very first joke book I wrote on the first page, ‘In 1978 the greatest comedian of the previous generation Richard Pryor came to Nairobi, stayed a couple of days but never performed, wouldn’t be amazing if the greatest comedian of our generation Dave Chappelle came to Nairobi and performed.’”

That very same year, Lu Savali launched the Punchline Comedy Club after quitting a well-paying job in the oil and gas sector. He had also worked for the United Nations and a couple of international companies in the energy field.

“When now we started Punchline, I told my team, let’s try and get Dave Chappelle. I wrote e-mails to any person who had any degree of separation from Dave, including his management. I even wrote an e-mail to Dave’s wife Elaine, but never got any response from anyone. Over the years I continued doing this -- writing e-mails and DMs on Instagram -- but still got no response,” he recalled.

A breakthrough was to come eight years later, in April 2024. At this point, Punchline Comedy had grown, attracting other international comic acts such as Ian Lara and Monroe Martin, both of whom have participated in the popular The Last Comic Standing Reality Show (an equivalent of America’s Got Talent).

“It was on a random Saturday night, and I was sitting in bed when I got a call and the caller said, ‘Listen, we have been watching you, we are coming to Nairobi. My team will be in touch with you then we set it up (the show). The caller didn’t introduce himself. In my mind, I thought it was Nick Cannon. He had talked about bringing his Wild ‘n Out Comic show to Africa, and I thought he was trying to recruit Kenyan comedians for it. It wasn't until later, when Dave's team reached out via an e-mail and a call, that I realised who the caller was.”

Lu Savali said meeting the comic was all aligned by fate, as neither Dave or his wife, nor his team got a chance to see his hundreds of e-mails and direct messages sent to them up until when they made contact with him.

Chappelle and his team receive thousands of e-mails and DMs daily, so it would be a difficult trying to comb through them all.

“It's fate because this were two people trying to find each other in the dark, as none of my messages got even close after all those years. It turns out that, as I was busy trying to reach them, they had been watching and monitoring our content closely. Dave always wanted to do a show in Kenya and had done some digging, and someone mentioned my name to them,” Lu Savali said.

The team proposed that Lu Savali organise a show night at Nairobi’s Two Grapes Wine Bar, where Punchline has been hosting Open Mic shows since 2017. Open Mic are live shows for amateur and professional comics to test their jokes.

“The team said they had been following me and Dave wanted to do a show at Two Grapes -- he liked the venue. They had a picture of Two Grapes when we started the Open Mic, where we used to sit outside with no canopy, the floor was muddy, the rains would catch us off-guard, the stage was small, and had poor lighting, yet this is where Dave wanted his Kenyan show. I got a little bit confused because, first of all, why would Dave want to do an Open Mic Nairobi? Second, Dave would easily fill a 20,000-plus capacity venue but he is here insisting on doing a small event.

The Punchline team had to push back with his management team and eventually reached a consensus to have a show at the Louis Leaky Auditorium.

“Dave’s rider (a document of an artiste's technical, logistical, and hospitality requirements for performance) was then sent, with a non-disclosure document for me to sign. Dave’s team was clear: the masses shouldn’t find out about the planning of it and the show until much closer to the date.”

What seemed like an abrupt show to Kenyans was an event that had two months of extensive planning.

“Everybody says Chappelle’s show was impromptu, it was not. This calibre of professionals doesn’t do things by halves or chance. We spent weeks planning for it because we had to get training on how to produce a Dave Chappelle Show. At his cost, he dispatched a team from the US to Kenya to train us on production. We had to fulfil the technical, hospitality, and security rider,” Lu Savali said.

Dave Chappelle's no-phone policy at his events is a stance he takes to protect himself from being distracted on stage and also his work from being recorded and distributed without permission. Any form of recording device is never allowed in.

The renowned comedian takes this rule so seriously that he even stormed off-stage after spotting fans with their phones out at a gig in Florida in 2023.

“We had to be trained on how to bag and tag the smartphones of fans that were secured in Yondre pouches. We had to do dry runs on filtering, basically how people would come in, what time they would be seated, and what time the show would start. Our DJ received a playlist from his team and had to rehearse what music to play when bringing Dave on stage and what music to play during what time of the show, how to balance the sound. We booked the auditorium way in advance and were rehearsing over and over again in the empty venue. We had a special stool made for Dave that he signed on it after his performance. So how could you possibly achieve all this if the show was happenstance?”  Lu Savali said.

The Yondre pouches had to be flown into the country from the US for the show, and were later dispatched to Rwanda.

“Hiring the pouches has to only be from Yondre, who is in a business agreement with Dave. It took two weeks to have the pouches delivered and cleared by Customs,” he explained

Even with all the planning, Dave insisted on a small audience.

“We had to push to have more people attend the show, from the 100 people Dave wanted, for it to make some business sense to us.”

Although the show was announced 48 hours before D-Day without any marketing campaign, Punchline Club still managed to make profits, according to Lu Savali, who remains cagey about the exact figures. The ticket sales alone generated Ksh2.9 million ($22,445).

“For the Dave Chappelle show we made a good margin that I am not allowed to say. For the ticket pricing, Dave’s team asked us what price we wanted the tickets to be and we settled on Ksh7,000 because we wanted tickets to be accessible to people. We didn’t want to lock out anybody who really wanted to attend by overpricing the tickets, but again, the tickets had to have value because this was a Dave Chappelle show.”

Besides implementing the comic’s rider, which was quite demanding in itself, Lu Savali said he faced a lot of pressure from different quarters after they announced the show.

“I had cars trail me for several days since the Dave Chappelle event, and it's because I said no to so many advances and requests. There was so much pressure within those two days ahead of the event. So many people wanted free tickets, including MPs, and there was intimidation and threats of interfering with the show if I didn’t cooperate. A lot of bribes were offered to us. Would you believe me if I told you I turned down a Ksh4 million ($31,000) bribe from someone influential, who was desperate to meet Dave?”

But that was not all.

“There was a lot of pressure coming from some quarters of the government that were pushing to have Chappelle go to State House, but we couldn’t make that happen for reasons I can’t talk about. The pressure on us increased especially when Dave met President Kagame in Rwanda. I had to turn down a lot of corporate brands that now wanted to jump on board as partners and were offering millions of shillings. But I said no because some of these brands we had been approaching before had been turning us down but now want in because it’s Dave Chappelle,” he said.

The 36-year-old also said he received a lot of hate from the entertainment industry.

“Some people within the industry felt Punchline didn’t deserve to be the ones to bring Dave Chappelle to Kenya but them.”

Away from the set and despite the controversies that Chappelle has attracted throughout his career, Lu Savali describes him as the humblest successful person he has ever met.

“I have never met anyone who is so successful and legendary but very down-to-earth. Like, when we were hanging out in Yellow Springs, Ohio, my wife was pregnant at the time and, although he had people who could do this, he asked her ‘Can I fix you a drink, what do you need?’ and he basically went behind the kitchen counter and made her a drink. Generally, being around him, you get a different energy. He keeps his circle tight and one of his close notable friends that we did hang out with is the rapper TI, who is now doing stand-up comedy. Can you imagine we were hanging out and, out of all these people, the most chilled person is the greatest person in the room -- and that’s Dave!”

Chappelle came to prominence in 1990, when he appeared on America's Funniest People show in September, just shy of his 20th birthday, and since then his prominence has risen in the comedy world.

For more than a decade, Forbes has ranked him among the highest-paid comedians in the world. His net worth varies from source to source, with many estimating his fortune at between $60 million and $90 million.

In 2016, Chappelle signed a lucrative deal with Netflix, which paid him $20 million for each special he released on the streaming service.  Between then and June 2018, Chappelle delivered his three Netflix specials.

In 2021, in an interview with UK supermodel Naomi Campbell, he revealed that he had been pondering relocating to Africa to start a new life, having in the past lived in South Africa briefly at the height of his career. In 2005, Chappelle turned down a $50 million deal and flew to South Africa.  At the time, his highly successful sketch comedy series, Chappelle’s Show, had aired for two seasons on Comedy Central. 

Ahead of the third season, Chappelle left the series turning down the $50 million deal offered by Comedy Central for the new season. The Mark Twain Prize-winning funny man could not emotionally continue with the show.

“I wasn’t walking away from the money. I was walking away from the circumstances. When you’re a guy that generates a lot of money, people have a vested interest in controlling you,” he told Oprah Winfrey on her show in 2006. He said he felt suffocated as he worked on the series and reached a point where he had to leave.