Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (8 page)

Chapter 14
Testifying with Chris Rock

With all the breakthroughs in television, seven words are still verboten on the networks—and Chris Rock says most of them in his cable specials. My dad’s generation called this “working blue,” and Chris has clearly made that his color palette. Although I had seen all of his specials, I decided to watch them again, back to back, before sitting down to talk with him. The one thing that stood out far stronger than the forbidden language was his preacher-like message: Be responsible for your kids. Don’t cheat. Pay attention to what your government is doing. Get a job. Stay in school. Treat women with respect. It’s all there, woven in with the outrageous language and his larger-than-life energy. When I told Chris that I thought he was really a preacher at heart, his answer surprised me. “My grandfather and great-grandfather were preachers,” he said. I guess it’s not just comedy that’s in our DNA.

—M.T.

M
arlo:
To be a successful nightclub comic, you have to have a lot of energy. But you have more energy than almost anyone I’ve ever seen. Most guys stay pretty close to the mike. You pace wildly back and forth, stalking the audience like a caged tiger. Why is that?
What
is that?

Chris:
Basically I’m trying to be a good director.

Marlo:
Meaning?

Chris:
Meaning, if you’re standing in one place, a person can turn away from you to say something to their friend, and then when they turn back you’re right where they left you. But if you’re walking around, they can’t say anything to their friend. They have to pay attention.

Marlo:
That’s really interesting.

Chris:
Yeah. I think [Eddie] Murphy was the one who told me that.

Marlo:
And when you stop, we really pay attention.

Chris:
Right. You stop on the punch line—and pow! It’s walk-walk, plant, deliver punch line.

Marlo:
Have you always moved back and forth like that?

Chris:
You know, it’s one of those things that, once I figured it out, it catapulted me. You learn a lot doing stand-up. First, you think it’s all just about jokes. “All I need is jokes. If I have the best ones, this will work.” Then if you’re in it long enough, you realize that the guys who are actually the best performers go the furthest.

Marlo:
And the guys with the best jokes?

Chris:
They write for other people.

Marlo:
Right.

Chris:
So, you watch. And you get passed by some guys, and you learn from them. My friend Paul always says, “Competition keeps you in condition.”

Marlo:
That’s right.

Chris:
I remember before I cracked, I went to see Martin Lawrence at Radio City. And, you know, that was something—seeing somebody at Radio City who’s your age, who started the same time as you, and he’s playing in front of six thousand people while you’re still playing in front of three hundred. You can be bitter and think there’s some conspiracy against you, or you can sit there and
learn
.

Marlo:
You’re often compared to Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. That’s a tough standard to live up to.

Chris:
But those guys are better performers than me. They really are. They’ve got these great voices, great characters, and then they put jokes
around
those characters, where I just kind of start with the joke. But that doesn’t faze me. I remember seeing Cosby one time and it was, like, one of the best shows I’d ever seen. It made me mad, like, “Uch, God, what am I doing with my life? How could this guy be so good?” And I said that to him when I went backstage after the show. And he said, “Well, of course I’m better than you. I’ve been doing this thirty years longer than you. What do you expect?”

Marlo:
In Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary,
The Comedian,
you come backstage and talk to Jerry about that. In the film, Jerry has been putting his act together, beat by beat, joke by joke, and you tell him you just saw two hours straight of Cosby, with all new material.

Chris:
All new. All great. Confident.

Marlo:
Right. And Seinfeld’s face just falls. At this point, he has six minutes of new material, and that’s all. We know exactly how he feels. But you not only keep coming up with new material, you also have something different from Pryor and Murphy. What do you think that is?

Chris:
I guess just a different set of experiences. I didn’t spend that much time on the chitlin circuit, so as a comic, I’m kind of raised by Jews, essentially. I was around guys like Robert Klein and David Brenner. I’m one of the rare black comics who got to spend a lot of time with Jewish comics. And because of that, I can perform just about anywhere.

Marlo:
Like a lot of black comedians, you take white people to task. But you spend equal time taking black people to task.

Chris:
I take
everybody
to task.

Marlo:
Right. When I watch you on stage, I think there’s got to be a preacher in your family somewhere because . . .

Chris:
Oh, yeah—my grandfather.

Marlo:
You’re kidding me!

Chris:
My grandfather and my great-grandfather.

Marlo:
That’s so funny. I was actually joking—but when I watch you, I think,
My God, this guy is sermonizing to people.
“Don’t drop out of school. Get a job. Be responsible for your kids. Don’t hit women.” I mean, there’s a whole moral code there, just like with preachers.

Chris:
I like preachers. They’re essentially doing the same kind of gig as me, just not trying to get a laugh. And we’re both trying to hold people’s attention.

Marlo:
Right, and to lead them.

Chris:
And to lead them. One of these days I want to do one big sermon as a TV special. A sermon can be about one topic for an hour and ten minutes. I would love to try to pull that off as a comedian. Literally talk about just one thing.

Marlo:
I’m sure you could pull it off. You obviously picked up a lot from your grandfather.

Chris:
Well, I spent a lot of time with him when he was preaching. He was like one of my best friends. He had tons of talent and used to preach on the weekends. He’d drive a cab during the week, and I’d sit with him in the front of the cab. And he would never write the sermon—he would just write the bullet points, then kind of rip the sermon. And I write my jokes in the same way. The important thing is what I want to talk about.
We’ll figure out how to make this funny later, but right now, the most important thing is the topic.

Marlo:
Exactly. Like your jokes about our having so much food in our country, that we have the luxury of being allergic to it. You say, “There’s no dairy intolerance in Africa.” That’s such a great observation. Was your grandfather also funny?

Chris:
Oh, he was hysterical, hysterical. Some people are just accidentally funny, but he loved being funny.

Marlo:
In his sermons?

Chris:
A little bit in his sermons, but mostly in his life. He was kind of a Mr. Magoo, and full of contradictions—he was a reverend, he went to jail, he cheated on my grandmother constantly, just loved the ladies. One of those complete guys.

Marlo:
Did he get to see you be funny on stage?

Chris:
A little bit, but he never got to come to a big house. He was gone before I bought the big house.

Marlo:
Did he tell you jokes?

Chris:
No, he never told me jokes. My whole family’s humor was mostly about how bad they were going to kick somebody’s ass that day.

Marlo:
Like?

Chris:
Like, my brother once told a guy, “I’m going to beat you so bad you’ll be the only guy in heaven in a wheelchair”—and you knew he meant it. He wasn’t telling a joke.

Marlo:
Beat-up humor. That’s a new one.

Chris:
Yeah. My family never, never ran out of ass-kick metaphors.

Marlo:
Tell me about your dad. You revealed a little bit about your relationship with him in your TV show,
Everybody Hates Chris
.

Chris:
Yeah, same thing as my grandfather—he liked being funny. But my father was a straight guy. He didn’t chase women. He was his own guy. I don’t know how to explain my father. He was a teamster and the person they would always send somewhere to be the first black guy to work at that place. Because he could take it.

Marlo:
Take what?

Chris:
The abuse.

Marlo:
Physical abuse?

Chris:
Sometimes physical. Sometimes verbal. He was the first black driver at Rangel Brewery, the first one at the
Daily News
. . .

Marlo:
A stand-up guy.

Chris:
A real stand-up guy—and they knew he could take it. Long story short: At any factory job or wherever, somebody always sells coke. Somebody is always in charge of drugs. It’s their territory and nobody else is allowed to sell them. Well, my father’s friends were selling coke at the
Daily News,
and my father was the one guy who decided that he wasn’t going to do it. And these were all guys I grew up with—I called them “Uncle.” And they ended up going to jail. But not my dad—he was home.

Marlo:
That takes a lot of nerve. Was he a big guy physically?

Chris:
Yeah, he was pretty big. But everybody’s dad is big to them.

Marlo:
What I mean is, he was the guy you knew could take care of himself in a fight.

Chris:
Yeah, but to “take it” meant, if somebody hit you, you didn’t do anything back. That’s what they meant by “take it.” They wanted the guy who wasn’t going to get in a riot, or end up getting killed.

Marlo:
He must have had a big influence on you.

Chris:
Yeah, it rubs off. I can definitely “take” show business. My God, what the hell. If you can’t deal with “no,” if you can’t deal with abuse, you know you’re in the wrong business.

Marlo:
And what was your mom like?

Chris:
My mom is funny—she’s still funny. Well, not as funny now because she’s trying to get into heaven.

Marlo:
You mean she used to be dirty funny?

Chris:
Yeah, but not sexual dirty. My mother used to curse up a storm. But if you mention that to her now, she’s like, “What are you talking about? I never cursed.”

Marlo:
That’s so funny. You know, something you do that I find really charming—and I haven’t seen any other comedian do this except Red Skelton: You’re often delighted with your own joke. Red would laugh after he said something funny, and you do that, too, sometimes.

Chris:
But you know what? I’m laughing with the audience. I just like to see them laugh, especially those people who haven’t laughed in a while—and you can spot them because they’re laughing so hard. I like shocking a crowd. I like it when the wife hits the husband because he’s laughing that shame laugh. That
I can’t believe he said that!
laugh.

Marlo:
All of the man-woman stuff you do is wonderful. Like when you say, “You ladies, you know your man better than he knows himself. You
know
what kind of man you have.” You can just see the women in the audience loving it.

Chris:
Because it’s true! “You knew that if you didn’t sleep with him for a month, something was bound to happen. You knew this wasn’t the guy to go on strike with. But you did it anyway!”

Marlo:
Just great. Your act is beautifully crafted. You know, when I was a kid, I was fascinated by watching how my father crafted his material. I always thought of him as a cross between an orchestra conductor and a bullfighter.

Chris:
Yeah, well, you won’t get bloody, but you can get hurt up there.

Marlo:
Do you map out everything ahead of time, or do you figure it out on your feet?

Chris:
It evolves. The average HBO special that you watch, that guy has probably done that material in 30 concerts. For every special I’ve done, I must have done at least 120 shows.

Marlo:
So you know what works.

Chris:
I know what works, but I play with it, too. I don’t lock in on show number 30 and do the same thing. I play with the order. “Okay, I’m going to do all the relationship stuff first tonight.” Or, “Okay, I’m not going to curse tonight.” I just play with all of it and see how the act works inside and out. You’ve got to make it like a movie, especially when you play the big houses. Your mentality has to be a little different.