Rock on a roll

Chris Rock's lightning reflexes

by Jon Garelick

Was it any wonder that the recent New York Times magazine article on racial profiling reported, "[Chris] Rock is very popular with white cops"? A portion of Rock's stand-up show, you may recall, became notorious as "the Routine." The core of the Routine was Rock's explanation of why "I love black people, but I hate niggers." He went on: "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 shootin' at the screen. `This movie is so good I gotta bust a cap in here!' " And, though he loves rap, he hasn't had trouble going after the anti-intellectualism that justifies itself through gangsta rap. "Niggers love to keep it real. Real dumb."

If Chris Rock isn't America's funniest or most talented comic right now, he's probably the most necessary. The history of American comedy is rich with cerebral gamesmen -- dada doctors of the absurd like Ernie Kovacs, Steve Martin, even S.J. Perelman and Ian Frazier, with their New Yorker-ese wordplay. But the comedy of ethnicity strikes at a deep vein of American comedy that goes back at least as far as Mark Twain. Ethnic comedy digs into what the critic Margo Jefferson has called "our national insecurity complex" -- where everyone is, in some sense, an exile, a yokel just off the boat, trying to disguise the accents and habits of the old country, the old neighborhood, the strident tones of "uncivilized" family arguments at the kitchen table. It's our great American narrative: from Don Corleone to Chris Rock, America's a country where everyone is trying to pass. It's our version of class consciousness. It's a malady even American white guys suffer from. Steve Martin's comedy routines, you might say, were born of a man gone insane from minding his table manners. Rabbi Donald Pollack has pointed to the Marx Brothers as the purest form of assimilation-anxious ethnic comedy -- each of them representing a different level of assimilation, from Zeppo's smarmy pseudo-gentile manners through Groucho's dismemberment of the English language to Chico's classical-piano-playing paisan and Harpo's literal speechlessness. Harpo is so fresh off the boat, he doesn't have language. On the one hand, you could say he's pure Swiftian id, slave to his appetites. But you could also look at him as the liberated émigré -- speechless because he can't believe he's arrived in a country where everything is allowed, and food and sex are everywhere.

It's one thing when ethnic comedy bubbles out of Jews like the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason, and Billy Crystal. It's another when a black comic genius like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, or Chris Rock digs into it. "When you're white, the sky's the limit," says Rock. "When you're black, the limit's the sky." Billy Crystal can pass in a way that Chris Rock never will, no matter how much Rock cleans up his language or how sharp he presses his Brooks Bros. suit. "There's not a white man in this room that would change places with me," Rock tells the audience at Harlem's Apollo Theatre in his new HBO special Bigger and Blacker. "And I'm rich!" Even a one-legged white busboy, says Rock, is telling himself, "I'm gonna ride out this white thing, see where it takes me."

"The Routine" might have made Rock a favorite with white cops, but all that proves is that Rock is still dangerous, still a lightning rod. In Bigger and Blacker (airing this Saturday, July 10, at 11:15), he paces the stage continuously in his charcoal-gray reflective suit, eyes, clothes, and smiling teeth all flashing. Sometimes when he digs into a punch line with that grin, he's all teeth, a slick beanpole cartoon character, the Road Runner and Bugs combined. He immediately goes after the Columbine shootings: "I'm scared of young white kids!" He snickers at the idea that the "trenchcoat mafia" were reacting to either a severe conformist social pressure or media-induced violent fantasies. "What happened to crazy? CRAY-ZEE!" But what Rock really relishes is that for a few cultural microseconds at least, people are afraid of white kids instead of black kids. No matter how white cops read "the Routine," it's clear Rock isn't out to give aid and comfort. He lists the NYPD as a major health hazard for blacks and recounts his own run-in with profiling: "They scared me so much they made me think I stole my own car!"

Rock skates back and forth over the fissures of ethnic assimilation and racial barriers. He won't let up on white people, but he won't let up on blacks, either. On black family life (Rock comes from a Bed-Stuy family of seven siblings), he's merciless. He berates a cousin who complains that her son's not getting an education. "If you said more words to him than `Mommy be right back,' he might know something!" And he offers a simple proverb regarding the upbringing of African-American males: "If he calls his grandmother `Mommy' and his mother `Pam,' he's goin' to jail!"

Rock also laments the lack of visionary black leaders, though he gives props to Jesse Jackson's ability in foreign affairs ("You want the United States to be really mad at you? Give the hostages to me!"). Once again he cuts Farrakhan some slack ("Black people don't hate Jews. We hate all white people."). And he cuts into the elevation of rap stars as great social leaders. " `Assassination'? Tupac and Biggie? Them niggers got shot. I loved Pac, and I loved Biggie, but SCHOOL WILL BE OPEN ON THEIR BIRTHDAYS!"

Rock's not perfect. He lacks Pryor's gift for mimicry, Murphy's motormouth virtuosity, and not all his observations are in the pocket. He avoids Murphy's blatant homophobia, but when he talks about AIDS as if it were strictly a heterosexual problem, you might feel he's playing it safe. On the new DreamWorks version of Bigger and Blacker (recorded partly on the same tour that produced the HBO special), there's some familiar material, some "guest" appearances from Ice Cube, Ol' Dirty Bastard, and Biz Markie (Prince Paul produced), and at least one extended sex joke that deflates long before it's over. But for the most part Rock's the right black man saying the right things at the right time. There should probably be a moratorium on Bill & Monica jokes, but Rock packs more punch on the by-now standard observations simply because of his language, his delivery, and who he is. So when he says that Clinton got impeached "for lying about a blow job so his wife wouldn't find out," his take on American social and political hypocrisy lights up where others sputter. "He got her a job?!" says Rock with mock indignation. "She blew him for a couple of months, the least he can do is give her a recommendation!" And as for Republican fundamentalists: "No 20-year-old girls are tryin' to blow Orrin Hatch!"

 

"I'M FROM THE COMMUNITY," jazzman Wynton Marsalis once told an audience when the subject of race came up. "I'm not just someone who saw some negroes once." Rock's roots in the "community" come through in nearly everything he does. Where his roots don't come through is where he's likely to fall flat. But when he talks about the difference between "white" supermarkets and "black" supermarkets, his observations are deadly. And his paean to the sexuality of "fat black women" is as funny as it is free of mean-spiritedness. He brings to mind the comments of another black jazz musician, Wynton's polar opposite, Don Byron, an African-American "from the community" who's played Jewish klezmer music and worked with Biz Markie. Byron has said that his own trips into klezmer were about ethnic identity -- "how to be American and ethnic." And he went on to describe his delight at watching the Clarence Thomas hearings a few years ago and listening to the comments of average white folks in neighborhood bars. "For the first time," says Byron, "I was listening to white Americans talk about how this black person is different from this black person. I was in heaven."

I don't know whether Chris Rock is a black neoconservative in Puff Daddy's clothing or a true subversive ready to shake us all up with new outrages (he takes a little from each). But as he bores into granite-hard stereotypes and explodes them, he gets us to see our differences -- and like them.