By Jasmine Gearie
It’s been 10 long years since standup comic Chris Rock took to the stage and recorded a special. A lot has changed for him during that time, and Rock’s got something to say about it.
He’s in his fifties and his daughter’s are now teenagers, he’s divorced and discovering modern dating. He ran the gauntlet of a custody battle, and has emerged out the other side looking for serenity. As he says towards the end of the show, “Peace makes my dick hard”.
But what modern audiences will let pass as a joke has swiftly changed, and there was a sense of nervous anticipation, for me at least, over whether the comedic virtuoso could eschew his way through a minefield.
Rock doesn’t leave his audience waiting though. He walks on stage with the awe of a man who is returning to his childhood home, then slaps you across the face with a bit about why the police should shoot more white kids.
“You would think the cops would occasionally shoot a white kid just to make it look good,” he says.
Everybody laughs, and breathes a sigh of relief. Yeah, Chris Rock still kills.
He exposes the absurdity of white America like nobody else, getting into race, law enforcement and gun control right off the bat — proving he didn’t come back to fuck around.
Fellow comedic legend Jerry Seinfeld once said of Rock, “You know how hard it is to make racism just plain fun? Rock does it. Racism to Chris Rock is just a Hacky Sack on his foot… the tension release he offers is available nowhere else, from no one else. He has the same facility with sex, with marriage, with politics”.
While the show covers much of what Rock has built his name on, in a new departure, the second half of the show sees him delve into periods of Dave Chappelle like introspection, as he reflects on the break up of his 18-year marriage.
It’s in these moments where Rock seems genuinely real and vulnerable, and connects with his audience on a deeply personal level for possibly the first time in his career.
Here lies the true brilliance of Chris Rock. With his hindsight, Rock has real wisdom to impart upon his audience, something valuable for them to take away at the end of the night.
For people in relationships, he has two pieces of advice. First, to stop competing with each other. And second, to realise that when you’re in a relationship, you’re in a band. “Sometimes you sing lead and sometimes you’re on tambourine,” he says.
Chris Rock’s Tamborine is now streaming on Netflix.
Pulp Circumstance 