ROCK ON

Spotlight

at a time when black comics seem to be on auto-destruct (Martin Lawrence, picked up for playing in traffic; Eddie Murphy, detained by the L.A.P.D. during a nocturnal charity run through the curbside transvestite community), Chris Rock has been a rough diamond of brilliance and clarity. While others squander their gifts, he guards his well. A regular for three seasons on Saturday Night Live, Rock proved himself a solo force in his HBO comedy special Bring the Pain, a hilarious bout of verbal shadowboxing that showed he could take an audience into areas they were afraid to go. Rock followed the C*6'reer-making special with a funny, offbeat, recently renewed talk show, also on HBO, in which he took further risks, pulling cinema verite stunts like asking the residents of Howard Beach to sign a petition to rename a local thoroughfare Tupac Shakur Boulevard.

On a roll, Rock has become a one-man multimedia outlet. He has a comedy CD, Roll with the New (DreamWorks Records), a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards, and a book coming out this fall called Rock This! (Hyperion). Unlike so many comedians' books, this one isn't a wispy flight through the land of whimsy. It's closer to a hip sociology primer, with direct hits on such subjects as the difference between white skin-magazines and black ones: "In Playboy, the women don't have a blemish on their bodies. In Players, the model's got stretch marks from the eight kids she's had, plus the bullet wound from the time she got shot in the ass." Like his heroes Richard Pryorand Sam Kirrtson, ChrisRock deals in raw, exaggerated truth—reality checks to the solar plexus. What makes him unique today is the absence of cynicism or burnt-out irony in his humor. He heckles and sasses society from the sidelines with the happy abandon of a young Ali. In his exuberance, his words seem jet-propelled.

JAMES WOLCOTT

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