Seriously Funny

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Some may inquire whether the subject of wit is worthy of such effort. In my opinion, there is no doubt about it... --Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious

Chris Rock just got his butt whupped by a woman. It's midafternoon at the Chelsea Piers boxing facilities, and Rock is shooting a taped piece for his eponymous HBO talk show. The idea: Wouldn't it be funny if Rock went around New York City gyms looking for the next Great White Hope? The twist: he runs into female boxing champ Christy Martin, and in a staged fight, Rock gets knocked around the ring as if he's a shoe in a clothes dryer. Now Rock is seated on some bleachers, catching his breath. After a few minutes, Martin edges over and--in a surprisingly shy manner for a woman who batters other women for a living--asks Rock to pose for a commemorative photo. "Whatever you need," says Rock. "Just don't hit me."

You might expect a guy named Rock to be a little tougher. But Rock, 34, is a comic, not a fighter.He can't throw an uppercut, but he knows how to get a laugh. And right now, he's the funniest man in America. Dick Gregory calls Rock "a genius." Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels says, "There's always one comic a whole generation imitates. Chris dominates now. There's no one as good." Then again, Jerry Seinfeld, a pal of Rock's, says this about Rock's hip-hopping in-your-face style: "It's the yelling that makes it special. It's very easy to hear what he's saying. Beyond that, I don't see anything special about it." Among comics, such joking put-downs are the ultimate display of respect.

Rock is making the most of his moment. He could have stuck to the Eddie Murphy/Martin Lawrence path to fame and fortune: 1) sign up for a buddy-cop film; 2) ad-lib your way through the criminally formulaic script; 3) get paid; 4) repeat. But Rock is playing it smart and working with Hollywood's edgiest comic directors. He has a co-starring role in Dogma, a film by Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy); a lead opposite Morgan Freeman in Nurse Betty, a film by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men); and a star turn in I Was Made to Love Her for the Weitz brothers (American Pie).

Even Woody Allen says he's looking into appearing opposite Rock in a comedy about sportscasters that's in the early-development stage. "Ninety-nine percent of the business is really talk," says Allen, "but I'd love to work with him."

Rock's gift is this: he can make hard truths sound funny. It's an invaluable talent in a disinformation age in which it has become more and more difficult to talk about things as they actually are. There's a near constant rush toward metaphorization, toward transmuting events into mediagenic terms. Oral sex isn't about sex, some pundit or other tells us, it's about honesty. Snorting coke isn't about drugs, it's about the media. Shooting up your high school class isn't about gun control, it's about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Rock cuts through the b.s. Suddenly we wake up, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, and find ourselves in a tub of goo with robots ruling the world. "Rock says everything you want to say but that you're not quite sharp or smart enough to think of yourself," says MTV president Judy McGrath, who signed him up to act as host of this week's MTV Video Music Awards, to be held at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. "Once you hear him, you say, 'Exactly!'"

So here's what Rock said about the "assassination" of rap stars Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: "Malcolm X was assassinated. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Them two niggas got shot." His take on white poverty: "There's nothing scarier than a broke white man. The broker they are, the madder they are. That's why white people start forming groups and blowing up s___. Freeman. Aryan Nation. Klan. Poor, pissed-off white people are the biggest threat to the security of this country." And his view on single moms: "It doesn't take a scientist to tell when you're gonna have f_____-up kids. If a kid calls his grandmama Mommy and his mama Pam--he's going to jail."

Rock is like a hotel shower: his controls are hard to understand, and you never know whether what's going to come out of him is going to be soothing or scalding. "It's good, it's intelligent," says Allen about Rock's stand-up. "He sucks the audience in quickly and keeps them." And his unpredictability is part of what makes his comic take so fresh. "Somebody should always be offended," Rock says. "Somebody in your life should always be like, 'Why did you have to do that?' Always. That's just being a real artist. That's the difference between Scorsese and Disney."

A new joke operates almost as an event of universal interest. It is passed on from one person to another, just like the news of the latest conquest. --Ibid.

Rock's office in midtown Manhattan has a crisp, professional cool to it, as if he were running a start-up Internet company instead of a comedy talk show. Still, his eclectic personal taste is revealed in the decor: there are several Woody Allen posters on the walls, including one for Take the Money and Run, a small table with a couple of Jean-Michel Basquiat art books on top, a CD rack with a few old Prince albums. The Chris Rock Show starts its fourth season next Friday, and rows of index cards on a board next to Rock's desk chart out the show's upcoming guests. It's a varied list, featuring such not-so-celebrated celebrities as Ken Hamblin, a conservative black talk-radio host; and Les Nubians, a terrific but little-known French-speaking hip-hop/R.-and-B. duo. These are the kinds of off-center guests that would get on Leno or Letterman only if Pamela Anderson Lee canceled at the last moment.

Rock sits at his desk, flipping through a manila folder with scripts from his writers for proposed sketches. This is the most important moment of the day--deciding what makes him laugh. "I like humor that's not really funny," he says. "I like talking about subjects that aren't funny in the first place and making them funny. So anything down and depressing is something I'll talk about." He accepts a sketch about a hate group (the wrinkle: the group hates its leader too). He rejects a documentary parody called Scared Straight in which gay men scare kids "straight."

Rock wants to create a show of lasting quality. Asked about the furor du jour in TV-land, the dearth of minorities in prime time, he gives a surprising answer. He acknowledges that there's prejudice but says minorities need to work harder, improve their game. "I was raised to believe that you had to do things better than white people in order to succeed. The old black shows were better than the white shows. The Jeffersons was a lot better. Good Times was way funnier. Sanford and Son. Now, though, everyone thinks we're equal, so we submit the same s___ that everyone else submits. And then we get mad when they won't air it. You got to go back to the old attitude of it has to be twice as good."

Rock knows about hard work and hard times. He was born in Georgetown, S.C., and grew up in a poor part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. His dad (who died in 1988) worked as a truck driver for the New York Daily News; his mom was a schoolteacher (she now runs a day-care center). Rock was bused from his black neighborhood in Bed-Stuy to a white high school in Bensonhurst. He says the students there were "worse than white trash--they were white toxic waste," and would beat him up regularly. Funny thing was, even though he was a misfit in Bensonhurst, after a while he didn't fit in back in Bed-Stuy either. And nobody in either place took him seriously. It was then Rock first realized he was a comic, not a fighter. "I just remember that whenever I got really mad or passionate, like in an argument, people would laugh, and I'd be dead serious," he says. "It would happen a lot. So it was like, 'Gee, I've got something here.'"

Rock quit school and, after a stint as a busboy at Red Lobster, launched a comedy career. He was a clueless 17-year-old, playing small clubs around New York like the Comic Strip, trying to read the crowd, trying to milk laughs, usually failing. He wasn't making much--the Comic Strip paid $7 a set during the week, $40 on weekends--but he was trying to get his name out there, trying to build a rep. His big joke was this: "Woman comes up to me, says she'll do anything for me, anything. So I say, 'Bitch, paint my house!'"

"He used to always tell me he needed another joke like 'Bitch, paint my house!,'" says Mario Joyner, a comic and friend of Rock's. "He thought that was a big bit for him." Rock, frustrated that crowds wouldn't laugh, once poured a drink on a man's head. Clubs refused to give him much stage time, agitating him further.

So Rock, the high school dropout, began to study. He watched Richard Pryor's concert films, listened to records by Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, memorized jokes by Moms Mabley. He haunted comedy clubs, watching other comics. One summer night in 1986, Rock was hanging out in the Comic Strip when he saw Eddie Murphy. He got Lucien Hold, the club's talent coordinator, to introduce him. Murphy asked if Rock was on that night. He wasn't...but now he was. Rock decided to take the stage and, as they say in comedy, he killed. Murphy gave him a small role as a valet in Beverly Hills Cop II. A few years later, Rock joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. He had arrived. But the kid who couldn't fight was in for a battle.

In the years that Rock was on SNL, 1990-93, the show was loaded with future superstars: Adam Sandler, David Spade, Mike Myers. Rock found it hard to get airtime, difficult to get SNL's mostly white writing staff to put him in sketches or understand where he was coming from creatively. He quit SNL in 1993 to join Fox's mostly black comedy show In Living Color--only to see it go off the air the next year. His career began to slide.

So in 1996 Rock and Joyner hit the road. Rock was interested in playing smaller stages, black clubs. He wanted to reconnect to audiences, to the street-level reality that had made his act funny to begin with. The result was Bring the Pain, his landmark HBO special. "He opened up his material, and it allowed a larger audience to be receptive to it," says Tim Meadows, a fellow SNL cast member. "Chris started talking about things onstage that he talked about in personal life--social and political issues."

The show's title came from a song by rapper Method Man; the show's spirit came from hip-hop too. Rock, dressed in black, stalked the stage, barking jokes in a rough cadence somewhere between a Baptist preacher and RUN-D.M.C. Like a hip-hop deejay, Rock sampled the personas of the comic greats he admired--Gregory's political smarts, Richard Pryor's scatological eloquence, Allen's nebbishy charm--and mixed them into something new. "I'm a rap comedian the same way Bill Cosby is a jazz comedian," says Rock. "Cosby's laid back. I'm like, bang, bang bang, right into it."

The material was angry, real, so funny it hurt. Colin Powell will never be Vice President, Rock cracked, because white people know what will happen: "If we had a black Vice President right now, I couldn't wait to kill the President." He argued that O.J. Simpson got off because of his fame, not his skin color: "If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn't even be O.J.--he'd have been Orenthal the bus-driving murderer."

But Bring the Pain's most talked-about bit was Rock's searing riff on "black people vs. niggas." It was a caustic comic commentary that contrasted the values of upwardly mobile blacks with those who had given in to a kind of gangsta nihilism. "There's like a civil war going on with black people," Rock declared. "There are two sides: there's black people, and there's niggas. And niggas have got to go." Niggas, in Rock's view, were a source of ignorance, violence, family dysfunction. It was a riff that resembled traditional stand-up comedy in the way that an open wound sometimes resembles a smile.

"The taboo he shattered was exposing the secret, closeted discourse among black Americans about their own," says cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson. "Rock signifies an unwillingness among the younger black generation to abide by the dirty-laundry theory. That theory suggests you don't say anything self-critical or negative about black people where white people can hear it. But the hip-hop generation believes in making money off the publication of private pain and agony."

The bit could have been seen as a sellout: the mainstream press suddenly embraced Rock as a tough-talking truth teller, unafraid to critique his own race. Says hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, an early fan of Rock's: "The white media chose pieces of Rock's performance that made them feel comfortable, and they wrote about it and they loved him."

But something more interesting was going on: the bit was significant in part because it wasn't aimed at the ears of whites. Blacks have long complained about being ignored by the larger community, unheard, unseen. Rock's riff aired on HBO, not BET, but it was about black folks, for black folks. He didn't care what whites thought or whether they were even listening. Suddenly whites were the ones rendered invisible, inaudible.

As minority communities swell, no doubt more conversations on the national stage will take place without reference to whites, as darker Americans bounce to hip-hop and live la vida loca without caring how it affects their image in the eyes of the white community. "Now [members of the mainstream media] have to live with [Rock] even though he makes them uncomfortable," chuckles Simmons. "And I think that's fabulous."

Wit-making is not at the disposal of all, in general there are but a few persons to whom one can point and say they are witty. --Ibid.

You are standing in front of Chris Rock's home: a carriage house in Brooklyn, ivy hanging from the front, a quiet street except for a kid a block or two away blasting Bob Marley's Is This Love from the open windows of his van. Malaak, Rock's wife, answers the door, and a rat-size terrier explodes out, yapping. "That's Essence," says Malaak. Named after Essence, the magazine? "Named after the Essence Awards, where Chris and I first met," she corrects.

Malaak leads you up the stairs, past three framed posters of Miles Davis, past a shelf containing pictures of Rock's family and copies of books like Dorothy West's The Wedding, into the kitchen, where Rock, dressed in a Phat Farm T shirt, sweat pants and white gym socks, is watching the world track-and-field championships on TV and flipping through the sports section of the Daily News. Some of Rock's friends suggest that the couple have experienced domestic difficulties of late, but right now they look comfortable together; relaxed, laid back. Still, there's a little work mixed in with this lazy Sunday afternoon--Rock's searching for material in the paper for his jokes for the MTV Video Music Awards.

Rock, despite his brash stage persona, is often subdued in private. His head writer, Jeff Stilson, says the man viewers see on Rock's specials is actually "Chris Rock times 1,000." Still, when a subject strikes a chord with him, Rock will go off on a comic jam session. Take white rap-rock. "It's kind of sad that when you watch MTV, you don't see a lot of cool white guys anymore that are cool without acting black," he says. "Like when I was a kid, Axl Rose was cool. David Lee Roth was cool. And they were cool and white. And acting white. Comfortable in their whiteness. Now everybody tries to act black. Kid Rock looks like he sleeps in RUN-D.M.C.'s closet."

On The Chris Rock Show, Rock says, his writers supply him with about half his material; when he's performing at clubs or doing his one-man specials, he writes all his jokes himself. He generally avoids computers ("I had one once, and it crashed") and instead writes his ideas down in red pen on yellow legal pads. ("I've got notepads from when I was in fifth grade.") Lately he's taken to calling up his answering machine and leaving messages for himself. His comic ideas begin as cumulus clouds of general observation before coalescing into the thunder and lightning of his stand-up. "I had something the other day--this thing about men, that no matter what they're doing at their job, if some beautiful woman walks by, you try to do it cool," says Rock. "So I'm trying to figure out how you unload a garbage truck cool--or whatever. Notes like that are what I leave for myself."

In his off-hours, Rock hangs out with a core group of comics--Seinfeld, Joyner, SNL's Colin Quinn, a few others. "It's sort of the same reason cops and prostitutes like to hang out together," explains Seinfeld. "No one else understands them." It's a group that meets for nonprofessional reasons, but the camaraderie often sparks humorous ideas. Nevertheless, Rock declines to share jokes in progress even with his friends or his wife, doing his writing in private. The onetime high school misfit still has trouble fitting in. "I really can't trust anybody," Rock says. "Even the people who love you will have momentary lapses in love or they'll take advantage of you. It's too powerful, the fame and the money."

But despite his solitary, almost misanthropic basic nature, Rock feels the essence of his humor is in shared experience. "The material comes from whenever you realize that you and someone else have something in common," says Rock. "So any conversation you've had more than once, anything you see happening to you that you see happening to a friend, you go, 'Hmmm, that's a situation I can make funny.'" To road test jokes, Rock slips into clubs late at night and performs unannounced.

Rock doesn't see himself as a spokesperson or a leader, but nonetheless he's trying to pave the way for the next generation of comics. He's funding the Illtop Journal, a college humor magazine patterned after the Harvard Lampoon that will be based at Howard University in Washington. The Illtop Journal is set to start publication this fall. "In his various travels Chris has been frustrated by the lack of comedy writers of color," says Stepsun Records head Bill Stephney, an adviser on the journal. "So this is the best way to address that. He also noticed that many of the writers at SNL, at Conan and Letterman came from the Harvard Lampoon. What better way to create more black comedy writers than to replicate what happens at Harvard at Howard?"

So maybe Rock is a fighter. Not with his fists but with his jokes. His punch lines are his punches, his gibes are his jabs. In fact, just as Muhammad Ali had his Rumble in the Jungle, Rock hopes to set his next HBO stand-up in the symbolic location of Africa. "It's weird with stand-up comedy," he says. "It doesn't really translate worldwide. I want to figure out how do I make it worldwide. Do a special in Africa. Can't beat that. Pull that off, then I will have done something." And the guy who got beaten up in grade school, who got whupped on his own TV show, who now rules American comedy, would finally be the undisputed comedic champion of the world.