Esquire Interviews Chris Rock

The Article: Chris Rock: A conversation about LeBron, Obama, the Tea Party, the Oscars, Eddie Murphy, his new play, and fear by Scott Raab in Esquire.

The Text:

SCOTT RAAB: Is that your iPad?

CHRIS ROCK: Why would you go anyplace without your iPad? This is the greatest invention. When it gets a little more power, my God. It’s like my office.

[The waitress comes over: “Water to start with? Sparkling, still, tap water?”]

CR: You know what? Tap water. I’m tappy today. How’s tappy? It’s Bloomberg’s best, right? I’ll take that.


SR: The magazine’s buying, man. Have some Pellegrino.

CR: I’m okay. I’m tap. I’m tap.

SR: Will I see you at the Garden for the Heat game?

CR: No, I’m going to St. Martin.

SR: Could I have the seat?

CR: I already gave it up.

SR: I’m writing a book about LeBron. I’m a Cleveland guy. I’m mad at him.

CR: I don’t even see what the big story is.

SR: Cleveland’s hurting, Chris.

CR: Cleveland deserves to hurt. I said that wrong. Deservedly so, hurts. But I’m telling you, weather alone should’ve been cause for panic.

SR: He’s got a LOYALTY tattoo.

CR: Loyalty to friends. And all his friends are right there. God bless him.

SR: They all wanted him to stay.

CR: No, they didn’t. They all wanted to go. And by the way, he’s surrounded by six 25-year-old black guys — where do you think they want to be? They want to be in Miami.

SR: I know that you’re right. I’m just having a hard time getting over it.

CR: It’s the weather, dude. I can’t believe no one’s written that article. If Dwyane Wade played in Milwaukee, LeBron would not be in fucking Milwaukee.

SR: I believe that. Chicago I thought was possible…

CR: He was not going to Chicago. What’s the point? It was all about the fucking weather.

SR: When’s the last time you toured as a stand-up?

CR: About three years now.

SR: You miss it?

CR: I’m looking forward to doing it again. But touring’s hard. When you’ve got kids, it’s a big undertaking. It’s like doing four movies in a row. It’s the whole world now; it’s not just the States.

SR: The comics I’ve talked to have varied styles as stand-ups, but the throughline is that it’s the most intense thing they’ve ever done.

CR: Yeah. A lot of guys are great, but they don’t want to hit hard. To hit like Tyson up there, that shit is — I just presented some award to Oprah at the Kennedy Center. I probably did four minutes, five minutes. It’s weird — you go up there, it’s like, what’s the guy in Lord of the Rings who puts on the ring and he’s invisible? Then he lets it off and he’s sweating, like it’s so hard to be fucking invisible. It’s hard to hit homers. I try to hit homers. I’m not a singles hitter. I’m swinging like Sheffield every fucking time. As hard as I can.

SR: I’m not bad-mouthing Tracy Morgan, but he was talking about the legacy of Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, and I’m thinking to myself, You’re not in that league.

CR: Oh, I don’t think he thinks he’s in that league. Maybe he’s aspiring to be.

SR: You’re more of the truth. You weren’t put on this earth to make people feel comfortable laughing.

CR: No. I get it. I embrace it. Gladly. Somebody’s got to be that guy… Am I eating all this pizza?

SR: God bless you. You’ve got a good appetite for a skinny young man.

CR: In between projects. I eat now. The play [The Motherf**ker with the Hat] starts in April. So from February on, I’ll be in the gym. I’ll be watching my calories.

SR: Ever done anything like that?

CR: Never done a play. I did a thing called 24 Hour Plays, a thing they do every year on Broadway. A bunch of playwrights and actors get together, you write a play and you act it out in 24 hours, literally. People pay and the money goes to charity. So I did one — I was horrible.

SR: Horrible?

CR: I was bad. I was terrified. And I was like, “Oh, I gotta do this again.” Because I know I can do it. When you do something bad and you know you can do it, only you know you can do it. And do it while it’s hot, man. Right now, while I’m this guy who can get this great play that Scott Rudin’s producing. If I wait too long, till I’m on the other side of show business, then I’m in Rap of Ages or I’ll be some guy in Grease.

SR: What Ever Happened to Chris Rock?

CR: Oof.

SR: I don’t know which comes first, the sense of insecurity or the reality that this does happen, even to icons.

CR: No one announces you can’t do something anymore. I remember I used to see Christian Slater movies all the time. One day they just stopped making ’em. He didn’t get a memo. No one passes you a note. I remember having Jimmie Walker hats when I was a kid, lunch box, shirt, loose-leaf — you think he was warned? No. You think, Oh, I haven’t worked in six months, I’ll get a job next week. Oh, I haven’t worked in a year, now I got to really concentrate on it. It’s like finding out somebody cheated on you. Somebody tells you, you overhear it at the fucking coffee shop…

SR: You have not fallen off that tightrope.

CR: I don’t think so. Even if a movie’s not a hit, it still has to have something to do with the big thing, which is the stand-up.

SR: That’s still the big thing?

CR: It pays the most, first of all. It’s the thing that I can do at a high, high level. Amongst the best. You’ve got me and Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais and Louis C. K. and Larry the Cable Guy. Louis’s the best right now. He just played Carnegie Hall. Louis C. K. is one of the biggest comedians in the country. You know the weird thing about Louis? He’s an East Coast guy, been in New York the last 20, 30 years of his life, but the New York cultural elite doesn’t like him — too blue-collar, too Sternish for them. It’s very much like Howard Stern. And they only give it up to Stern now because of the money.

SR: Louis’s way past anyplace Howard Stern’s ever been.

CR: Howard Stern’s a bad motherfucker, man. Whenever I talk to Howard, I always point out — and I’ve been trying to point this out to my wife — I know some of it you don’t like, but if I had to be on six hours a day, it would be just as nasty and foul and not sophisticated. The fact that you’re going to see me do an hour every four years? Reduce Howard Stern to an hour every four years, you’d have the most brilliant comedian who ever lived. It’s not even close.

SR: Like many nice Caucasians, I cried the night Barack Obama was elected. It was one of the high points in American history. And all that’s happened since the election is just a shitstorm of hatred. You want to weigh in on that?

CR: I actually like it, in the sense that — you got kids? Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last — this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they’re fucking knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.

SR: I hope so. Because it seems like a lot of people feel they just can’t live with this man being president.

CR: It’s a lot, man. I remember when I had my show [The Chris Rock Show on HBO], I used to run my show. It was so hard to get people to bring sketches to me. No one had ever worked for a black person before. Even the black people hadn’t worked for a black person. In show business, my God, there’s no black people in show business. I’ve never been to a black person’s office in show business, for a movie or anything. It literally took a month or two for everybody to know: I’m really running the show.

SR: Strange.

CR: It’s strange, but it’s not. Women that were running things went through the exact same thing. I could’ve went crazy about it, but I actually felt sorry for them.

SR: Jude Law — you killed his career when you hosted the Oscars.

CR: I did not kill his career. Dude, I didn’t say Jude Law can’t act. I didn’t say Jude Law was in bad movies. I just said he’s in every movie. I hope one year in my life someone’s onstage talking about all the movies I’ve made. I hope I get to work with all the great directors he got to work with, too… I did bump into him one day. I was just walking by him and said, “What’s up?” and he kept walking.

SR: He knew it was you?

CR: I think ten minutes later he started realizing who I was. Anyway, I was sitting with Courtney Love, and she might’ve saved me from a fight. I’m not going to say ass-whipping, because I don’t think there’d be an ass-whipping. But you never know — he’s hanging out with Guy Ritchie. Those guys go at it. Those motherfuckers are in shape. So Jude Law might whip my ass, I don’t know. Those guys bring out mats and shit.

SR: What happened?

CR: Nothing. Courtney kind of barked, or was growling, and that was it.

SR: And you pissed Sean Penn off. Which, by the way, could lead to an ass-whupping.

CR: It could.

SR: Theoretically.

CR: Theoretically. It’s the Oscars, it’s sensitive. If I host the Oscars again, I wouldn’t do that.

SR: Chris, I wouldn’t worry about that.

CR: I’ve been inquired about. What they do with the Oscars is, they check the availabilities. They’re not into asking and being turned down. “What’re you doing on February whatever? Will you be in L. A.?” So it’s been inquired about since then. It’s a weird skill. It’s not like you can get just anybody to do it…

When I got the job, the first thing I asked was, “Are we doing a TV show or is this a banquet? Because if it’s a banquet, let’s not change anything. But if it’s a TV show, this motherfucker’s got to move.” My goal in life was to host the MTV Awards, because it’s the awards show that Prince sang on, and that was the awards show that Eddie Murphy hosted and Arsenio hosted. It’s hard to remember that the MTV Awards used to be huge. So the Oscars just wasn’t that thing to me.

SR: Is Eddie Murphy a cautionary tale?

CR: When he wants it, nobody’s funnier than him. No one’s even close to him. I just went through a little exercise where I watched a bunch of old movies, like from the ’80s. The only ones that held up were the Murphy movies. A Murphy movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy — he’s that intensely good… He revolutionized acting. He’s literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking to you right now. Just like we’re talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him. Good Times is a good show for that: It was either John Amos or Jimmie Walker; that’s what black acting was.

SR: You ever doubt yourself up there trying to get laughs?

CR: There’s doubt the whole time. One of the best compliments I ever got was Conan saying to me, “You know what I like about you? You’re smart enough to be scared. So many guys come on cocky, they don’t want to go over their stuff, they don’t want to do a pre-interview. You’re always smart enough to be worried till the last minute.” That will not stop. You get some guys who get all cocky and they fall right on their fucking face.

SR: You learn to trust your stuff.

CR: I trust it, but you still have to — you can have your stuff, but your footwork’s still got to be right, you got to follow through, all these things. Even when you have your stuff, you cannot have your stuff because you’re not doing one thing.

SR: But nobody else is going to go out there and be you.

CR: Somebody’ll be me, tomorrow or whenever. I’ve been doing this awhile. My time’s limited. I’ve been doing this awhile.

SR: You haven’t lost anything off your fastball.

CR: I don’t think I’ve lost anything off my fastball, but soon you’ll see somebody else’s fastball. There’s nothing like a new fastball.

SR: Who’s the next guy?

CR: I like this Hannibal Buress kid. Black guy. The illegitimate son of Mitch Hedberg. Get his record — you’ll like it. If you like stand-up — see, a lot of people inherently don’t like stand-up, so when they judge a stand-up, they actually look at what he’s wearing. There’s been a lot of hair bands the last few years in the stand-up world. I will name no names, but I haven’t heard the words good-looking so much in my life. Who the fuck gives a fuck what a stand-up looks like?

SR: To me, it’s a miracle that guys can just get up there.

CR: And produce laughter. It’s kind of a magic trick. I still don’t understand it.

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