Ask a Black Dude: meet comedian Dave Chappelle.

Bad politics makes for good laughs. Just ask Dave Chappelle, the comedian who is starting his second season in January on Comedy Central with Chappelle's Show. "As a citizen, I'm freaked out, he says. "As a comedian, it's fertile."

Live, he's not shy about discussing the war in Iraq. At an April appearance in Boston on his "Blackzilla" tour he mentioned that he was against the war, giving rise to boos and cheers from the audience. He compared the hunt for weapons of mass destruction to a shaky drug bust. "Saddam Hussein was found dead with a gun and some crack," he said, in the voice of a news anchor.

Onstage, Chappelle is confident and conversational, moving easily from events of the day to more raunchy material and back again.

Chappelle downplays his politics, though. "When I do my act, I'm not trying to ever be political," he says. "But if there's something funny that happens, and I have a point of view about it, I'll do it. But it's not to be preachy. There's not a serious agenda behind it."

Chappelle knew audiences were sensitive to the topic of the war, and he felt some entertainers were hesitant to bring it up. But he thought it would be foolish to ignore it.

"As a comic, it's like, this is all anybody's thinking about," he says. "Why wouldn't I say something? They're watching the same bullshit I'm watching. Some people might feel the same way I feel. It's terrible. I don't think anyone was enthusiastic about the war except, like, in the White House."

Hearing then-Press Secretary Ari Fleischer denouncing Bill Maher's supposed unpatriotic comments was a scary moment, he says. When you can lose your job for exercising your constitutional rights, that's cause for concern, he adds.

He criticizes entertainment for being "less opinionated" than it used to be. "Now everything is so corporate," he says. "There's freedom of speech that'll protect you under the law. But who's to say I wouldn't lose my job if I said the wrong thing. Good lord, I've got a Coke commercial to protect."

He also sees more than a little hypocrisy on the part of rightwing radio hosts who trashed celebrities speaking out against the war but then applauded the celebrity who just won the governor's seat in California.

"Bill O'Reilly was bashing Alec Baldwin: 'Who's this guy? He's an actor. Why would anybody listen to his opinion?' " says Chappelle. But Schwarzenegger got a pass. "Now it's OK to have an opinion? Can I have an opinion or not?"

He conveys his opinions every week on Chappelle's Show. Amid the product and movie parodies and physical humor, a definite point of view comes through.

From a sketch about reparations for slavery to the logo for Chappelle's Pilot Boy Productions, the image of a slave smiling with handfuls of cash, Chappelle's Show focuses on racial politics.

Chappelle is interested in what divides people as black or white, straight or gay, or any of the differences that cause day-to-day conflict between people. (He also covered some of this turf in his 2000 HBO stand-up special, Killin' Them Softly.) Promoting political discussion is just a "pleasant byproduct" of what he does, he says.

"I'm more about promoting cultural dialogue than political dialogue," he says. "I think more good things come out of cultural dialogue."

Chappelle remembers hearing Richard Pryor, whose work as a standup laid the foundation for Chappelle and countless other comedians, telling a story about two white policemen looking through a rule book to see how they were allowed to treat a black suspect. Pryor's appeal stretched across racial barriers, and he was able to make almost everyone laugh at extremely pointed material. That's the laughter that Chappelle covets.

To that end, two regular segments from the first season of his show, "Ask a Black Dude," starring Paul Mooney, and "Ask a Gay Dude," starring Mario Cantone, will return for the new season. The segments consist of the standard "man on the street" interviews, where people ask questions about being black or being gay. Mooney and Cantone are given the chance to react in studio, answering off the top of their heads and often coming up with the funniest lines in the show. One man asked why black people like marijuana so much. Mooney's initial response was somber, that black people just have it in them to party and sometimes they take it too far. He then followed up with the slam, "Don't ask me about drugs, ask Whitney and Bobby."

Mooney, in particular, has a long history of dealing with race in comedy, having penned the famous "job interview word association" sketch with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase for Saturday Night Live, marking one of the first times the word "nigger" was used on network television. In the sketch, Chase interviews Pryor for a job, using a word association test. It starts out innocent, but escalates into an exchange of racial epithets, until Chase responds to Pryor's "honkey" with the dreaded word. Their faces only inches from each other, Pryor ends the game with "dead honkey," at which point Chase congratulates him on becoming the highest paid garbage man in the city.

Chappelle knew "Ask a Black Dude" would be explosive, and knew that Mooney wasn't likely to get an honest, open voice on another show. "He was a man that I think Hollywood was deathly afraid of. He's so opinionated," Chappelle says. "He's really an American treasure for black comedy. He's a genius."

It seems Hollywood might have had a similar fear of Chappelle. Before landing the deal with Comedy Central, he had been negotiating with just about every other network, each of them falling through. He recalls the "creative restraints and all the difficulties" of trying to get his edgy show on the air.

"The paradox of corporate art--how do I make that, you know?--it limits your venues," he says.

Now Chappelle has a hit, and with it an extraordinary amount of control over the program. He writes the show with one partner, Neal Brennan, with no other writing staff. He can bring in rising comic stars like Todd Barry and Patrice O'Neil, without having to answer to a regular cast.

One sketch on the program, for example, presents an episode of MTV's The Real World turned inside out, where there is only one white guy in a house full of black people. The piece exposes the rampant tokenism on reality and comedy programming across the board.

What amuses Chappelle most about race relations is how black culture has become mainstream culture. "I love the irony of it," he says. "Every time I hear one white kid call another white kid 'nigger,' it makes me smile. And I think that it might be one of the best things that's happened to race relations in quite a long time."

Nick A. Zaino III is a freelance writer and musician living in Boston. He writes a weekly column on comedy for The Boston Globe.