Bringing home the pain

Emmy winner Chris Rock knows how to rock America

by Jon Garelick

"This is the fun part for me, when the white people come back after intermission and find out niggers done stole their seats," Richard Pryor says at the beginning of his 1979 Live in Concert. He goes on to give dead-on impersonations of flustered, intimidated whites. It was something no black comedian had ever done, and it transformed Pryor's career as well as American comedy. Blacks caricaturing blacks on TV was something as old as Flip Wilson's Geraldine routine -- and the precedence for racial caricature extends back to Amos 'n' Andy and the entire minstrel tradition of the 19th century. In one stroke, Pryor was upending a comic convention so ingrained that his bit came across more as a cosmic realization than a joke, but hilarious nonetheless. The laugh that black and white audiences shared was liberating.

Seventeen years later, post-Pryor, and post-Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock has his own way of cutting against the grain. "Washington, DC," Rock beams as he struts the DC stage in his HBO special Bring the Pain (for which he just won two Emmy awards, including one for writing). "Chocolate Ci-tay! Home of the Million Man March! Had all the positive black leaders there: Farrakhan. Jesse. Marion Barry . . . Marion Barry! How'd he get a ticket? It was a day of posi-ti-vi-ty! You know what that means? That means that even in our finest hour we had a crackhead on stage!"

In the past two years, Rock has become America's most valuable court jester -- the laser-brained bell-capped fool bringing news we don't necessarily want to hear out onto the national stage. He's famous for his kamikaze attacks -- greeting Death Row Records' notorious Suge Knight on the MTV Video Awards with "Hi Suge, don't shoot me," or calling conservative commentator Laura Ingraham a "bitch" on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. But sometimes all it takes is Rock's presence to create a satiric edge. On Politically Incorrect, as the show's official presidential-campaign correspondent, all he had to do to get laughs was announce, tired and incredulous from New Hampshire, "Once again, I'm the only black guy around."

Since the beginning of the decade and his appearances as a featured player on Saturday Night Live, Rock's media franchise has grown so that these days he seems ubiquitous. He wrote and produced the rap comedy movie CB4 (1993); he appeared as a suffering crackhead in New Jack City and in a handful of other movies. More recently he's done commercial campaigns for MCI's (insidious) 1-800-COLLECT and for Nike (as the writer and voice of "L'il Penny"). He recently hosted the MTV Music Video Awards, and HBO has reinstalled his weekly half-hour variety/talk show, The Chris Rock Show, on Friday nights. Bring the Pain, taped in May 1996, gets regular play on HBO and has come out as a home video on Dreamworks. Many of the bits on Bring the Pain are also included on the new CD Roll with the New, which has in turn spawned the video hit single "Champagne," a dead-on parody of the rap "player" lifestyle, with Rock providing Puff Daddy-like commentary to a bimbo's cooing R&B ("Now coke costs too much and crack gives me gas/But if you give me champagne I'll give you this black ass"). Rock even has a new book coming out next month, Rock This! (Hyperion), which includes riffs from his stand-up show as well as some new material. So you can get his "Million Man March" routine on video, CD, and in the book. He's a marketing man's wet dream -- every part of the product is selling every other part.

As a stand-up, Rock doesn't have Pryor's emotional breadth (Pryor, after all, could be an enraged man shooting his car with a .45 -- and he could be the car reacting). He lacks Pryor's skills as a mimic and Murphy's motormouth pyrotechnics. Instead of flying through a range of characters (Pryor's white people, dogs, and inanimate objects; Murphy's women), Rock is always serenely, sweetly himself. Pryor's takes on whites and Murphy's sexual hostility are all subsumed in Rock's toothy smile and eye-popping expressions of disbelief. But his delivery rolls with preacher-like cadences, and when he hits a good punch line, he can give consonants the crack of knocking billiard balls. ("It was a day of posi-ti-vi-ty!"). In part, Rock's even keel (and even-handedness) is due to the rise of the black middle class. "Old black men went through real racism. He didn't go through that `I can't get a cab' shit. He was the cab." But he also may be more naturally even-tempered -- it's difficult to picture him in a Pryor-like gun-waving altercation with a girlfriend.

Rock's take on blacks doesn't end with Marion Barry. In fact, a portion of his show has become legendary as the "Routine," a good 12 minutes or so on why "I love black people, but I hate niggers. . . . Every time black people want to have a good time, niggers mess it up. . . . Can't keep a disco open more than three weeks. Grand opening? Grand closing. . . . Can't go to a movie the first week it opens. Why? Because niggers are shooting at the screen. `This movie is so good I gotta bust a cap in here!' "

Much as he's professed a love of rap (including the gangsta rap of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur), he also jumps on the "keepin' it real" anti-intellectualism of the street. "What's the capital of Zaire?" "I don't know that shit." "Why the hell not?" "Just keep'n it real." His conclusion: "Niggers love to keep it real. Real dumb."

In rousting his own community, Rock's taking risks. There's the actual physical risk involved in getting in Suge Knight's face (something Rock has been oddly circumspect about in interviews). There's also the social and political risk of breaking with the tribe -- something every American ethnic minority faces up to sooner or later in its art, whether in Philip Roth's portrayals of Jews or Martin Scorsese's marriage to the Mob. Like those artists, Rock does more than give an outsider audience an easy laugh at his own community's expense.

In her Pulitzer-winning essay on American comedy, the African-American New York Times critic Margo Jefferson points out (in defense of Amos 'n' Andy!) that America "is not a melting pot or a mosaic but one big ethnic variety show stuffed full of mixed dialects, mixed manners, and mixed motives." She applauds the tradition of comedy that goes to our roots as Americans -- our national insecurity complex, where in the shadow of Europe we were portrayed as buffoons but "retaliated by giving that buffoon a con man's wit and a prankster's bravado." The piece concludes, "Comedy is about our needs, our place in the world, and how we cooperate or collide with people just as obsessed with their needs and place. . . . And the comedy of ethnicity is always tied to that of social class: of new settlers who start in the barnyard, on the street corner or in the poolroom, then make their way to the office, the living room, and the cocktail lounge. Which means it is always tied to the question of who is laughing at whom and why."

Which is maybe why a white liberal can laugh with Chris Rock as easily as a black conservative. When I talk to Rock on the phone, he dismisses the idea of crossover. "What is crossover?" he muses. "At the end of the day, crossover is just being white, I guess." But crossover is what he's all about. His comedy continually juggles social types. Which is why his Marion Barry routine goes right to the heart of American comedy: "Our finest hour and we got a crackhead on stage!" Picture Roth's Portnoy, or Woody Allen as a Chassid at Grammy Hall's table, or Beavis and Butt-head just about anywhere.

Rock has a con man's wit and a prankster's bravado, all right. And if he loves rap, it's as much for its constant traversing of social status from poolroom and street corner to champagne bath. "I drink champagne in the 'hood/I drink champagne with Tiger Woods," his crew raps as the screen fills with homeboys trying to sink putts.

The O.J. case too becomes a comedy of social status and manners in Rock's hands. Of the verdict, he says, "I ain't seen white people that mad since they canceled M*A*S*H." For Rock, the case isn't about race but about fame and money. "If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn't even be O.J., he'd be Orenthal the bus-driving murderer."

On the latest edition of The Chris Rock Show (it had a five-week run in February before starting up again last week), Rock is hit-or-miss, but he still gets in his zingers, and the freewheeling obscenity (especially with a guest like Arsenio Hall) gives the show that prankster's bravado. Arsenio went on about the "honesty" of "new" music. "Puffy, Biggie, R. Kelly -- `I'm fucking you tonight,' " Arsenio exclaimed. "Johnny Mathis never sang `I'm fucking you tonight!' " Big eye roll and smile from Rock, and then: "Not to a woman."

For one of his sketches, Rock introduces "Professor Thad Taylor," a black man in a suit and tie who argues that racial discrimination now is worse than it was 30 years ago. Then he shows New York street video footage of himself being ejected first from a restaurant, then from a cab. The joke is that the professor is nude. "You see, this is a white man's world," argues Taylor. "Professor," counters Rock, "I don't think they're treating you bad 'cause you're black; I think they're treating you bad because you're buck-ass naked!" Dropping the professor's pants is a joke as old as America. For Chris Rock, self-righteousness of any color doesn't wash well here in the New Land.