COMEDIANS often toil in obscurity, honing their craft before hostile crowds in beery clubs and back rooms. Most could only dream of the year Dave Chappelle had in 2004. Crowds packed his stand-up performances, and his television special, “For What It’s Worth”, won two Emmy awards. He shot and starred in a popular documentary called “Block Party”, and “Chappelle’s Show”, his critically acclaimed sketch-comedy series, was in its second season on Comedy Central, a cable-TV network. (When the first season was released on DVD that autumn, it sold more than 2m copies, breaking sales records for a TV series.) Mr Chappelle had earned a large following for his unique brand of humour, at once fiercely intelligent, topical, incisive and profane.

But in 2005 Mr Chappelle abruptly abandoned his cresting career, walking away from a TV contract reportedly worth $50m. He decamped first for South Africa and then for rural Ohio, where he lives with his wife and children. Since then he has given few interviews, shot no films or TV shows, popping up only occasionally, usually unannounced, at comedy clubs. But after eight years shunning the limelight, Mr Chappelle returned to the stage on August 23rd to headline the 15-city Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival.

“I missed you guys a lot more than you missed me,” he told the 14,000-strong audience in Austin, Texas, who greeted him with a standing ovation. His performance was longer, shaggier, more baroque and far funnier than the tight sets of the comics who preceded him. Two main themes ran through his act: race and his decision to quit. He joked that it seems easier to resign the papacy than to walk away from a hit TV show. “At least they didn’t say [the pope] was smoking rocks in Africa,” he said (referring to the unfounded rumours of a drug problem that hounded him after his departure). He made fun of people who congratulated him on leaving TV with his integrity intact, saying, “That’s great: I’m going to go home and make my kids some integrity sandwiches.”

On stage he speaks with a warm, loping drawl. His stories were long and sometimes odd: one was a David Lynchian tale of a mysterious sex-tape mailer; in another he discussed getting high with bluegrass musicians. Throughout Mr Chappelle seemed to prefer the wry offhand remark to the on-point joke. “I have done 11 minutes of material in 45 minutes,” he said near the end. Yet his remarkable gift for connecting with audiences was undimmed—indeed, the unpolished nature of his act seemed to intensify it.

Theories for why he quit abound. Some say he had a mental breakdown, others presume he suffered from being “the one righteous man in a world of corruption”, as Jason Zinoman, a comedy critic for the New York Times, writes in his e-book “Searching for Dave Chappelle”. Though Mr Chappelle has never fully explained his reasons for leaving, in interviews he has said that he worried his comedy was becoming socially irresponsible. He mentioned hearing a white TV-crew member laugh during the filming of a sketch in a way that made him uncomfortable.

Race is an important theme in his work. When Mr Chappelle first started out, playing to racially mixed audiences in Washington, DC’s largely segregated comedy scene in the 1980s, he caught flak for “not being black enough” (a concern over racial fidelity that white artists never have to face). His TV show dealt with race frankly and often surreally: one sketch concerned a blind white supremacist who did not know he was black; another featured a “racial draft”, in which American ethnic groups “drafted” biracial or culturally hybrid celebrities (the Jews took Lenny Kravitz; the blacks took Tiger Woods; the Asians got the Wu-Tang Clan). In Austin a particularly funny (and unprintable) bit involved him hiring as his personal chef Paula Deen, a white Southern cookbook author who was recently fired from the Food Network for using racial slurs.

It is not clear what is next for Mr Chappelle when this American tour ends in late September. Despite his long absence, he seems at home on stage. If there were fewer roll-on-the-ground laughs than the audience may have expected, there was also the sense that a restless innovator is pushing the bounds of his art.