Chris Rock once defined a generation – but his shtick has aged poorly
At this point in his gildedcareer, 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 watercooler 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-totoe 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