VIDEO: Newly Ripped Dave Chappelle on Comedy Gone Wrong

Whether you love him or hate him, and whether you think his mind ran off the rails years ago or that he's just a principled man, you really can't argue that Dave Chappelle is among comedy's smartest men.

Not only is he intelligent, but I believe that few take a stand for stand-up comedy as a performing art form more strongly than his.

He's largely unflappable in his temperament, but as he shows during this recent FM drive-time interview appearing on Perez Hilton, he won't think twice about standing off with a disrespectful audience.

Chappelle talks here - when the two jocks doing the talking aren't man-drooling over Chappelle's newly shredded-up physique - about a recent Florida charity show, where he felt that organizers let Seminole indians in attendance heckle him hoping that they might get a "reverse-Michael Richards" race-baiting incident.

For Chappelle, it's nothing new. He once revealed something on-stage during a 2004 Sacramento performance that seemingly shed some light on why he couldn't get out of his Comedy Central deal fast enough. His audience wouldn't stop screaming "I'm Rick James, bitch!" in reference to his "Chappelle's Show" skit portraying the late funk legend for a "Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories" sketch.

Chappelle had enough, walked off the stage, returned a few minutes later, then told the audience that his hit show was "ruining his life." He told them he disliked what he deemed 20-hour workdays and energy taken away from his stand-up.

Then he got personal.

"You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid," he told the audience.

Honestly, truer words might've never been spoken. Next to wrestling fans, stand-up audiences can be some of the most disrespectful any performer can endure. Both are highly improvisational arts, where the performers must take the good with the bad but the best never get their feathers ruffled. In comedy, the best comedians don't just roll with the punches, they turn the tables.

It's historically a big part of D.L. Hughley's act, heckling the audience a little. And one of the funniest moments of Spike Lee's "The Original Kings of Comedy" performance flick involved Hughley's fellow "King" Steve Harvey getting one up on a floor-seated audience member by "borrowing" and mocking in front of a sold-out arena crowd the Members Only jacket the douche left behind.

Moral of the story, children: don't screw with Dave Chappelle. Number one, he's demonstrated that he can take it. Number two, if you do push his buttons a little too hard, he now looks like he could legitimately f*** you up six ways from Sunday.