He paused to let imaginations wander , then he leaned back, as if he had changed his mind about letting us know the answer. But he smiled and explained how he got into trouble with the tourism board there for a joke about how much pot people smoke. Woods said: “The guy said: ‘You want to smoke?’ And I said, ‘Land the plane first.’” Then he hit the microphone with his hand, his version of a rim shot.

Listen closely to Tony Woods and you can hear echoes of Dave Chappelle. There’s the low-key style, the conspiratorial glances, the shift from meditative mosey into explosive punch line, the peculiar and emphatic pronunciation of the word “man.” But the most obvious link might be the way they punctuate a punch line by hitting the microphone. Chappelle drops it on his leg and runs away, while Woods taps it, but the effect is the same.

The similarities imbue Woods with a certain mystique in comedy; he’s the Rosetta stone for one of the most significant stand-up careers of the past couple decades. In August, the standup Hampton Yount joked on Twitter: “Dave Chappelle always does a fake run off the stage after a joke, not because it’s good but because he sees the ghost of Tony Woods career every time.”

But there’s a difference between the sincerest form of flattery and the anxiety of influence. Over the years, Chappelle has become a far more political and philosophical comic than Woods, a defiant violator of norms and wager of cultural wars. When he started doing standup at 14, the most influential comic in America was Eddie Murphy, whose fast-talking profane swagger was widely imitated and amplified when “Def Comedy Jam” (originally hosted by Martin Lawrence, another D.C. product) brought black club comedy to a national audience on HBO. In interviews, Chappelle worried that the expectations set by this show pigeonholed black comedians. “It’s limiting everyone,” he told The Washington Post in 1993.