I Am So Old I Can Remember When Chris Rock Was Funny

Monday is about movies. And sometimes TV. Today, the new "LIVE" Chris Rock comedy special on Netflix. (Yawn).

Chris Rock debuted his new comedy special – Selective Outrage – as a LIVE show on Netflix.

The idea being you tuned in, like it was the big game. They even had a pre-show and post-show component. So you could get super hyped, then have the jokes explained to you after?

Netflix wanted to stage it this way to try something new. It was the stand-up equivalent to Prince Harry’s book: You tune in because you know there’s one thing he’s going to mention.

Chris Rock was slapped by Will Smith about a year ago to the day. It was The Oscars. It was surreal. And there were online headlines for days. The jokes have all been made. The memes still pop up from time to time. But this would be the chance to hear about it from the man who was slapped.

That is the selling point of Rock’s new comedy special.

And Netflix wanted to maximise the hype and drama of that by debuting it in a LIVE format.

But you can wake up today and still watch the show. It’s there for you to see. Today. Tomorrow. Next week.

So this is the future of Event TV. You can feel special for tuning in live. Or just wait an hour and still get to see it.

A quarter of a century ago, Chris Rock was one of the most reliable names in stand-up comedy. He had a handful of killer specials. And he had jokes for days. He talked politics, race, and pop-culture. And he nailed it.

There was a time in my life when I was a fan of his work. It would be futile to erase that from my memory. Comedy has cycles. For a time, Rock was one of the best to walk the stage.

But in the last decade, Rock has been desperate to be a celebrity. He has been desperate to be taken seriously as a comedic actor. Even, bafflingly, ditching broad comedy movies to appear in horror.

He is not a great actor. He is not even a good actor.

Pre-pandemic, he returned to The Big Comedy Special. Releasing a Netflix show in 2018, Tamborine. It was hyped as his big comeback. A major league comedian returning to the medium that made him.

It was a terrible show.

It confirmed him a lost, meandering old man, convinced of his genius, and he bragged about his infidelities that culminated in a divorce. The mother of his children reduced to an unfunny punchline as Rock essentially blamed her for his boredom. It was revolting to sit through.

They say comedy is therapy. Tamborine made me wish Rock had just invested in (more) actual therapy.

But would he be any better with Selective Outrage. The Will Smith slap material had to mean something right? We’d heard nearly every angle, but Rock had sat back, knowing the slap was at least worth a payday.

For sixty-one minutes of excruciating ‘build-up’, we get delay and no gratification. Rock tells us stale, male jokes. He whoops and hollers to the paid-up, card-carrying fans that he is going to talk about wokeness and triggering; is there anything more sad and annoying (let alone offensive) than hearing a nearly 60-year old comic decide their reckons on these issues are going to be the ones you need?

He trots out tired lines about Michael Jackson and The Kardashians. These are jaded subject areas. He riffs on Elon Musk for a bit. It goes nowhere.

I almost thought we were going to get a Christopher Walken impersonation.

For a former master of the game, this was like some botched Stand-up 101 tutorial at times.

And because it was being hyped as LIVE – the special is filmed in floodlights. It’s like those Def Jam Comedy spots of the 90s crossed with a Letterman or Tonight Show routine. Bright lights, in a big city. No mood to it whatsoever. (At least Tamborine had production values, had ‘direction’, had mood).

After some lazy traipsing around cancel-culture, offering nothing new, and more criminally, nothing particularly funny, Chris Rock goes in on his favourite subject of the last half-decade: He is nearly 60, he has kept himself fit and healthy, he’s rich and he loves fucking around; he’s ditched the old ball and chain and so now he gets to sleep with women half his age. Guess what? They’re cheaper too!

That’s the gist.

Painfully misogynistic, and worryingly unfunny.

It crawls towards that inevitable. His rage at the Smiths. Will and Jada both cop it. And rightly. I guess. But it’s all a big yawn.

And this “Big Event Comedy” means nothing – because to really make it mean something would have been to debut it as a live event then scrub it from the streamer. You had to be there. You had to set your alarm, or clear your calendar, or both. You had to sign in at the right time to see the thing. Then find the other people that had seen it and talk about it.

But no. This is cake and eat it shit. And it’s more shit than cake that you have to eat.

You will watch Chris Rock wrestle with himself. Smug and uncomfortable. He shouts his punchlines twice. He nervously laughs along with his own lines to sell them. He is almost convinced of his brilliance.