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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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.