Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...