Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Malaak leads you up the stairs, past three framed posters of Miles Davis, past a shelf containing pictures of Rock's family and copies of books like Dorothy West's The Wedding, into the kitchen, where Rock, dressed in a Phat Farm T shirt, sweat pants and white gym socks, is watching the world track-and-field championships on TV and flipping through the sports section of the Daily News. Some of Rock's friends suggest that the couple have experienced domestic difficulties of late, but right now they look comfortable together; relaxed, laid back. Still, there's a little...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...