Can you feel that? There it is, right there, on the edge of perception, a distant flickering of intermingled joy and worry. If you were alive and conscious back in 2003, you might recognize it: It’s the feeling of a million billion white college kids getting ready to start screaming “I’m Rick James, bitch!” at each other at the top of their lungs all over again.
This disturbance in the comedy Force comes courtesy of Netflix, which announced today that Comedy Central’s Chappelle’s Show—the sketch series that launched Dave Chappelle into comedy superstardom, and then just sort of kept launching him until he catapulted himself right back out of the high-intensity spotlight—is coming to U.S. Netflix on November 1. Netflix announced the news via its Twitter account, posting a video of pretty much every single dulled-by-repetition Chappelle’s Show catchphrase we all spent the better part of the 2000s swimming through in a sort of rich-but-fattening memetic sludge.
One thing that’s not clear from the video, though, is whether the versions of the series that’ll show up on Netflix’s servers will be the censored versions that ran on Comedy Central, or the uncensored ones that were released on DVD. (The promo video is bleeped, but it’s not clear if that’ll carry over to the show proper.) Given the way Chappelle never, ever blinked when confronting topics of race or other controversial aspects of the American heart—right from the show’s very first episode, which introduced Black white supremacist Clayton Bigsby to the world—it’s not clear if the show will run sans additional context, or whether it’ll end up getting one of those explanatory content notes that have become more and more common with streaming fare of late.
Chappelle, of course, has a long history with Netflix; the streamer has produced five of his comedy specials so far, most recently this year’s 8:46, which Netflix released on its YouTube channel.