The first act establishes Dave as the underdog. A child, being taken advantage of by a world he’s still too naive to und

Dave is a little older in the second act. He’s just finished a gruelling tour, but he’s making his own money. Succeeding, but not yet successful. He’s still the underdog, but at eighteen years old, he’s no longer quite a child.,One day, while he’s trying to figure out how to entertain a girl with the last sixty dollars he has to his name, he sees a group of guys playing three-card Monte. Some of them win, some of them lose, but all of them seem to be having a great time. Dave notices that the red card, the card he needs to identify in order to win, has a little bend on the corner.,The network is like that first comedian, “borrowing” Dave’s talents but offering him a fraction of what they’re worth. When Dave tries to regain control, the network looms over him, allowing him to get a sense of how much bigger and stronger it is and takes his work.,Spotting his chance to double his money, he walks over, puts his cash down, confidently points to the card with the bent corner, and…loses. Dave can’t understand what went wrong, so he stays there and watches, and as he does, he realises that the guys that he’d seen winning were all stooges. They were in on the act, pretending the game was fair to draw in the suckers.,The antagonist in this part of the story can’t be anything as ordinary as a man. As adults ourselves, we can’t sympathise as deeply with a man who is up against an equal, so Dave gives us an enemy that we can all relate to. He doesn’t come up against a man, he comes up against the man. And as he does, he once again finds himself in a world, this time the boardroom, which he’s too naive to navigate.,The story folds back on itself gracefully, like a decorative fan, and as it does, we’re brought back to that first image of Dave as a child, being robbed of his work by an enemy who’s too big to fight.,Modern machine learning research has demonstrated remarkable achievements. Today, we can train machines to detect objects in images, extract meaning from text, stop spam emails, drive cars, discover new drug candidates, and beat top players in Chess, Go, and countless other games.,The second act is less clear cut than the first. Dave could easily have painted the antagonist as a monster, but instead, he humanises him. This man isn’t a mere bully, he’s a man willing to fight to protect what’s his. Instead of hurting Dave, the man teaches him the importance of being willing to do the same.,Dave was furious. He’d been cheated out of his last sixty dollars. So when the next victim comes along, he yells out, “F*** that, man! Don’t put your money there! All these ni****s is in on it!”,From there, Dave takes us back through the layers of the story. The executives encouraging him to sign an unfair contract are like the stooges who hung around the guy playing three-card Monte, encouraging the sucker to believe that the game is fair.,In the final act, Dave is a man. Not only that, he’s a successful man. Already a well-known comedian, Dave is just about to sign a contract that will make him a household name. He’s about to become the star of the Chappelle Show.,The man running the game, who was huge, snatches Dave up by his collar, and the only thing that stops the man from beating him to a pulp, is the look of terror in Dave’s eyes. He looks down at Dave, as a father might look at a child, and gives him some valuable advice:,But the story doesn’t end there. At his lowest ebb, Dave plays his trump card. He asks the audience for their help. He asks us to help that child get back what was taken from him by refusing to help the networks profit from his work. He asks us to boycott him. Not the networks, him.,He’s offered a contract so complex that it’s impossible to understand. He signs it on trust. The phrase he repeats when he refers to the licensing clause, “in perpetuity throughout the universe,” is deliberately a little ridiculous. It highlights the fact that he was out of his depth, and the fact that those sharks in the boardroom had put him in that situation on purpose.,“I’m begging you. If you ever liked me. If you ever think there was anything worthwhile about me, I’m begging you. Please don’t watch that show. I’m not asking you to boycott any network, boycott me. Boycott the Chappelle Show. Do not watch it unless they pay me.”