Word: showing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rock's office in midtown Manhattan has a crisp, professional cool to it, as if he were running a start-up Internet company instead of a comedy talk show. Still, his eclectic personal taste is revealed in the decor: there are several Woody Allen posters on the walls, including one for Take the Money and Run, a small table with a couple of Jean-Michel Basquiat art books on top, a CD rack with a few old Prince albums. The Chris Rock Show starts its fourth season next Friday, and rows of index cards on a board next to Rock...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...