Word: blackly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...