At this point in his gilded career, Chris Rock doesn’t take an Oscars gig for the clout. He takes it for the check. And the 57-year-old funnyman made clear from the moment he took LA’s Dolby Theatre stage to present the prize for best feature documentary that he wouldn’t be sweating for it.
Rather than launch into a meticulous bit that might remind the world why he was once so big that he hosted this program all by himself twice, he made fun of the crowd – hack moves. He singled out Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, maligning her with a near 30-year-old movie reference, and everyone in the room laughed on reflex – because he’s Chris Rock. For his brief guest spot to end with Will Smith slapping him on live television and then heckling him from a front-row seat in some ways speaks to how much the comedy legend has slipped. (Smith apologized to Rock in an Instagram post on Monday.)
Back when GI Jane was water-cooler conversation, Rock was making a credible case as an all-time great comedian – the skinny, indignant kid from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who clicked up with Eddie Murphy as a teen and followed him on to Saturday Night Live by his mid-20s before his star became a supernova. But over the past decades, that star has greatly faded, as Kevin Hart has seized the box office mantle and Dave Chappelle has entrenched himself as America’s most talked-about comedian.
The fact that Rock will be touring jointly with Hart this summer seems to suggest that he can’t draw a crowd on his own any more – an idea that would have seemed unimaginable when he was roasting the Academy for its lack of diversity while hosting the Oscars in 2005.
While Rock is still a legit A-lister, one who stars in his own season of Fargo when he isn’t lending his voice to albums by Ye or Little Nas X, he isn’t exactly a cultural force these days.
Rock is one to joke about Will Smith getting $20m to do Wild Wild West. Netflix gave Rock twice that in 2016 to deliver a pair of comedy specials. And while the first, 2018’s Tambourine, earned Rock a Grammy nomination, he nonetheless came off relatively muted – tonally and sartorially – and somewhat diminished while whinging about women and stewing about the breakup of his marriage. (This was after Rock ranted about the millions he lost in his divorce in a 2017 interview on Scandinavian TV.)
Rock’s whole shtick – the pained but personable indignation, the pop culture references, the pentecostal delivery – has aged poorly. Worse, it doesn’t seem as if he can stop himself from punching down or pulling back the blows at his own people. And as he got rich, he was goading his audiences. Alas, Will Smith took the bait.
But at his peak? Few could follow Rock when he was actually trying. A trio of standalone comedy specials for HBO marked him as a piercing cultural critic with a skill for parsing the world from an unapologetically Black perspective, prowling the stage in head-to-toe leather in homage to Murphy’s Delirious.
Rock’s 12-minute monologue in his 1996 special Bring the Pain might be one of the best known comedy bits in history. In the second episode of the American version of The Office, Michael Scott’s performance of the routine leads to a day-long racial sensitivity seminar. The purposefully awkward spoof, besides being brilliant in its own right, speaks to Rock’s hip-hop swagger. He wasn’t just letting rap lyrics inspire the names of his specials or making fun of artist beefs from the standup stage; he was also making the kind of edgy content that was so catchy that white fans couldn’t help repeating it in public, no matter how ill-advised.
Bring the Pain, which won two Emmys and a Grammy (as a spoken-word album, Roll with the New) established Rock as a critical darling and a commercial powerhouse. He went from playing basketball-arena crowds to headlining major motion pictures opposite the likes of Morgan Freeman and Alan Rickman to producing and narrating the biographical Fox sitcom Everybody Hates Chris – which launched Abbott Elementary’s Tyler James Williams, propelled The Neighborhood’s Tichina Arnold and established the series co-creator Ali LeRoi. Rock advocated for collaborators like Wanda Sykes, who got her start as an actor-writer on The Chris Rock Show.
During its two-season run through the late 90s, there was nothing on TV that matched The Chris Rock Show’s mix of politically incorrect sketches (offensively named cereal, Halle Berry 911), straight-faced man-on-the-street reports (on the Tiger Woods effect in Harlem, on his own campaign to bust Bobby Brown out of jail), popular music showcases (Missy Elliott, Prince) and celebrity interviews.
In the season 2 finale, Rock sat down with Jada Pinkett Smith, then fresh off an appearance in Scream 2. After needling Pinkett about her big-brimmed hat, he returned to an earlier joke about her attending the Million Woman March – a concept he couldn’t get his head around. “Did you catch any sales?” he cracked.
At the end a gameshow buzzer sounded and a stage hand brought out a bottle of champagne. “You just did an interview without mentioning the name Will Smith!” he enthused. (“That’s terrible!” she said.) Among other things, it spared Rock having to talk about the time he appeared in drag as Will’s love interest in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as he was still finding himself post-SNL.
After the HBO show ran its course, Rock dived into film producing, developing Head of State, Pootie Tang and other crude comedies before acquiring a taste for richer fare and the urge to direct. But despite highbrow ambitions and an encouraging stage acting run in the 2011 Broadway production of The Motherfucker with the Hat, Rock never could quite resist the temptation to go lowbrow.
Death at a Funeral not only put a Black American spin on the dark British comedy, it kept Peter Dinklage on to make sure the joke at the heart of the film paid off. In I Think I Love My Wife, a reboot of a classic French film, Rock casted women as the root of all evil. And then of course he went on and made Good Hair, which does far more to put down Black women than uplift them.
Interestingly, Rock co-wrote I Think I Love My Wife with Louis CK – who worked with Rock on the HBO show and directed him in Pootie Tang. In a 2011 HBO special called Talking Funny, they appear on a roundtable discussion that also includes Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld. In one exchange Rock calls Louis CK “the blackest white guy I fucking know”. Louis CK asks if Rock is calling him the N-word, to peals of laughter from Gervais – who repeats the word. Meanwhile, Seinfeld squirms and pushes for a subject change.
Ten years ago, an awards show producer would have killed to get one of those comics to host. Now they belong to a class of comedians that would sooner turn off viewers than compel them to tune in. Success has made Rock too out of touch, too rich. And now he’s in a weird space – still a distinctive voice, but not all that thought provoking. For the comic whose material once defined a generation, that’s the real slap in the face.
• This article was amended on 30 March 2022. The title of the 2011 HBO show was Talking Funny, rather than Funny People.
