Looking back now, it feels like vintage, cocky Chappelle's Show: lowbrow aesthetics, a simple set up, and a piece of comedy so brash it could only have come from this show. Today, it’s hard to image a place on TV for a sketch like this (Key & Peele, for all of their considerable merits, would not have gone this far). You can understand how a white man laughing long and hard at Chappelle in blackface would have been deeply unsettling. You also look at it and think, this is a show that, again and again, had the courage of their convictions to take even bigger swings than this.

To his credit, Chappelle has not shied away from admitting the impact that walking away from the show has had on his life. Appearing on Letterman in 2014, before the Radio City gigs, he talked about being at a nice restaurant with his wife, and seeing a man across the room that he knows has $100 million, and noting that they are both eating the same entree. “OK, so, fine, I don’t have $50 million,” he said — the much publicized sum for the amount of Comedy Central’s money that Chappelle walked away from. “I have $10 million. The difference in lifestyle is miniscule. The only difference between $10 million and $50 million” — he paused, his playful boyishness briefly returning — “is an astounding $40 million.”

It seems, understandably, that he is neither all the way at ease with the decision, nor is he lamenting it daily. He is, rather, still chewing it over.

“Pixies” didn’t actually kill the show, of course: the peculiar swirl of attention, expectations, and responsibilities that landed upon Chappelle after the (deserved!) instant-canonization of his show would have caught him eventually.

Above everything else, I think it’s the responsibility part — the sense of duty to his own material — that did him in. When the “I’m Rick James, bitch!” shouts started, Chappelle was horrified: he was never aiming for cheap catchphrases. So he pulled the plug. He couldn’t imagine how to make TV that was neither pandering to what he’d already done, that was not just feeding a suddenly indiscriminate demand for his material. So he walked away.

It’s dramatic, yes, and since he’s yet to fully, fully return to us, we still obsess over the way he left. That’s just a part of our obsession, though. The brunt of it is directed toward the material he did make. Quotes from his summarily perfect sketches pop up in my head all the time. Little random ones. “You think this is a game? This is dude’s night out!” “Oh, yeah. Baretta did that shit.” “Tyree, you stabbed my dad!” It’s understandable that we obsess over how he left. It’s better to remember that, for two years, he never missed.