Chris Rock

[desdemona]

By Tom Shales

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page C01

Chris Rock is easily the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation, the Young Turk comics, although at 38, he's about as old as a Young Turk can be. Since rising to prominence and popularity, Rock has never settled for just being funny. His comedy can be bitingly perceptive about society, race relations, politics and whatever else pops into his brilliant head.

He's in the tradition of such great commentator-comics as Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Sam Kinison, yet as howlingly funny as Eddie Murphy in his prime and as bluntly explicit as Redd Foxx at his raciest. Everything Rock says, though, he says for a reason. Even when he's raunchy, it's thinking man's raunch.

Partly because Rock has let himself be distracted making trivial (but, for him, lucrative) movies, it's been too long since his last comedy concert on HBO. But he comes roaring back with "Chris Rock: Never Scared," another furious tour de force, taped here in Washington last month and premiering on HBO tonight at 10, with repeats several more times in April and May.

There's one worrisome thing about the latest Rock revel, his fourth for HBO. The last topic he addresses is marriage and the war between the sexes. He launches a few cruise missiles in the direction of women, for whom, he suggests, marriage is a chance to adopt men as pets. He's okay with the idea of same-sex marriages, Rock says, because "gay people have a right to be as miserable as anybody else."

The grim reality of marriage is that "it's all about her," he says, addressing himself to men who've managed to remain single. "Here's one thing they don't tell you: You can't make a woman happy. They like [expletive] complaining." Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a South African prison, starved and tortured, Rock notes, and when he came out he shrugged and said, "No problem." But after six months back with his wife, Mandela screamed, "I can't take this [expletive] no more!" And got a divorce.

"Nobody gets a 'soul mate,' " Rock says. "Just a mate."

Rock's ranting against women is frequently funny, and women in the audience appear to be laughing as hard as men are, but it has a disturbingly familiar ring; it's the same sort of thing that Eddie Murphy did during one of his big comedy concerts, and it signaled a sharp downward turn for Murphy's career. Murphy seemed seriously hateful against women, complaining especially about how richly they profited from divorce. Some of this sounded like creepy revenge against women that Murphy felt had done him wrong.

Similarly but not to such a vehement extreme, Rock gets awfully worked up on the subject. Then again, this is a man who is angry about almost everything and channels that anger into some of the best comedy around.

Rock can be wittily profound. He invokes NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal in explaining the difference between being wealthy and merely being rich.

"Shaq is rich," Rock says. "The white man who signs his check is wealthy."

Rock chides some African American superstars for bad behavior -- among them Janet Jackson, in words that can't be printed here. And brother Michael? "We let the first kid slide" when Michael was suspected of molesting boys, Rock says, but "another kid?! That's like another dead white girl showing up at O.J.'s house.

"And O.J. saying, 'I know what you're thinking . . .' "

Rock toyed with the idea of hiring Johnnie Cochran as your lawyer when in trouble with the law: "People say if you have Johnnie Cochran, you look guilty. Yeah -- but you go home. Is it better to look innocent and be in prison?"The comedian is at his peak lambasting and lampooning the federal government's drug policies: "They don't want you to use your drugs. They want you to use their drugs," he contends, "their drugs" being all those advertised night and day on television. "They just keep naming symptoms until they get to one that you've [expletive] got," Rock says. "They don't even tell you what the pill does!"

They just show people dancing in the streets or frolicking in a field, Rock says, and viewers think they've got to get some of whatever made those people feel like that. The government only goes after drugs sold on the street that don't benefit corporate America, he says. He has the gift of making a lot of sense about grim realities and still inspiring laughter.

Rock doesn't mention the irony of his appearing at Constitution Hall; the DAR banned African American singer Marian Anderson from performing there in 1939, and Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to sing for an audience of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial. Rock performing his socially conscious comedy from that stage to a largely but not exclusively black audience is a statement in itself.

Quoting Rock never really does justice to his material, because you have to hear him deliver it, his eyes wide with alarm, his voice raw with urgency, an occasional subversive "ha ha ha" of his own following a joke. An evening with Chris Rock is better than a trip to the shrink: just as therapeutic and much more amusing (unless you have the world's funniest shrink, of course).

You emerge not only entertained but also under the pleasant delusion that there's still hope in the world -- as long as there's still Rock in the world.

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