Seriously Funny

DAVID LEE -- HBO
This summer Chris Rock filmed his acclaimed HBO special, Bigger and Blacker, at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, below. Rock's comedy is sometimes blue, but, says Dick Gregory, "if you took out all his profanity, it would still be funny"

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MIRAMAX

Nowadays he is taking on more ambitious roles, such as Jesus' forgotten, wisecracking 13th apostle Rufus in Kevin Smith's forthcoming and controversial film Dogma, above; but Rock developed his acting skills in urban action movies like 1991's New Jack City with rapper-actor Ice-T; his big breakthrough came last year when he brought his fresh hip-hop sensibility to Lethal Weapon 4 and nearly stole the film from series regulars Danny Glover and Mel Gibson

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."