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INTERVIEWS: Still on Top

Chris Rock hopes for best, prepares for worst




Sometimes, Chris Rock thinks about the past.

"It's so weird, bumping into (Steve) Schirripa courtside of the Knicks game," Rock says of "The Sopranos" actor. In an earlier life, Schirripa managed the Riviera Comedy Club and booked the young comedian there. "We both look at each other and start laughing. 'Can you believe we're doing good?' "


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  • And sometimes, he thinks about the future.

    Rock, who plays the Colosseum at Caesars Palace today and Saturday, says he tries on everything from movies to talk shows "because it's going to stop one day, and you're going to be mad you didn't take advantage of the opportunities.

    "It's not that you fall," the 43-year-old clarifies. "It's just one day, there are new people and, you know, the opportunities aren't what they once were."

    Could it really happen to Rock after 12 years at the top of the comedy ladder? That's already beyond the fad status of a Dane Cook or Katt Williams.

    "Hey -- Michael Jackson, man," he is quick to counter. "One day you're Vanilla Ice and the next day you're ... Vanilla Ice."

    "It happens to everybody, man. I prepare for the worst," he says. "I think every show I do, I realize I could get booed off the stage and they could throw tomatoes at me."

    For the indefinite present, Rock remains on top of the comedy world. Almost literally. For his next HBO special, "Kill the Messenger," airing Sept. 27, the comedian performed the same material in three cities -- New York, London and Johannesburg, South Africa -- and blended the footage.

    "You get to see three different audiences laughing at the same jokes all over the world," he says. Sure, he injected a few local jokes and buzz words into each set. "But the beauty of it is people kind of laugh at the same things all over the world. It's kind of amazing when we cut (back and forth)."

    Rock doesn't change his political or election-season jokes in other countries. "We go to war, and it affects a lot of countries, so they're really onto our stuff."

    During the primaries, the comedian was a high-profile Barack Obama supporter. He cracked Bush jokes while introducing Obama at a Harlem fundraiser in November, and recorded an automated phone message to solicit Obama votes for the New York primary in February.

    But the primaries were "a different situation," he says. Now that it's closer to the general election, "If he calls, I'm there. But I don't want to get the guy in trouble or be a detriment at all.

    "You know how easy it is to take one of my jokes out of context and have it on Fox News?" he explains. "I got 800 Reverend Wright-like moments in my career. Especially if you cut out the laughter."

    He understands the dilemma fellow comedian Al Franken faces as he runs for the Senate in Minnesota. "Could Stephen King run for anything?" Rock muses. "Anything out of his books ..."

    When his "No Apologies" tour wraps Sept. 13, Rock says he will take a break from the live stage to pursue a movie. He will never give up stand-up, but he has been able to walk away from it for long stretches.

    "Stand-up's the main thing when it's the main thing," he says. "I kind of tour on a three-and-a-half to four-year cycle. When I'm done, I kind of put it down and don't mess with it for a while. You try to use your opportunities. If you've got the opportunity to do a bunch of different things, try 'em all out."

    Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.

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    Free Nevada wrote on August 30, 2008 12:31 AM: 300 word cut-off makes it hard to make your point on Politically Incorrect subject. That is: White, Brown and Red people also buy products they know are made by Chinese slaves and give money to performers like Lil' Wayne and Dave Chappell and Chris Rock who indulge in primitive decedent culture that could only be excused while the millions of descendants of US bred African slaves were integrating into our European-inspired American culture over the past 75-150 years. But just because the other races do it and they are wrong for that, there is no way that it is as ironic as watching Black people do it. Not after the sheer He11 their DNA has seen over the past 300 years. That's one thing the Jewish people did right when their mass slavery ended --they sewed right into their religion the seeds to ensure they don't promote or withstand it again. The leaders of the African American churches have tried to do it too, but they are just men and they make mistakes (like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright) and those mistakes cost them a lot of credibility so the decedent recording "artists" and "comedians" who are not held to any standards of decency totally wind up winning, scr3w1ng over the some percentage of that community that is still trying to escape that culture and become like the Honorable Senator Obama or the Great Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice or Dr. Martin Luther King or yes, even Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who are no less nor more men than say, William Jefferson Clinton


    Free Nevada wrote on August 30, 2008 12:09 AM: Watching him is a lot like standing at Best Buy during Christmas season and watching some inner city minorities fighting over the last of the $30 DVD players. 300 years ago, some more evolved humans gathered up less evolved humans from remote areas of the globe with a unique genetic marker causing them to have black skin and because their culture had not evolved as fast as Europe's, in innocent ignorance, they were thought to have been put on Earth to serve Europeans. They were then locked in shacks to breed specific characteristics of workers needed to do the labor required to make things for the US department stores of the day. 150 years later, European culture evolved to understand its mistake and killed each other by the hundreds of thousands so that the African man would gain the rights to start evolving again. The first 75 years was the natural purging of the breeding experiments that weren't viable to continue forward. And the last 75 years was a social integration of those African people who were viable into the European culture so many thousands of Europeans died to open up to them. Half way through the last 75 years, you had great African intellectuals like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and now Chris Rock. Yeah right. For those completely evolved descendants of the once severely abused Africans to come full circle and crack jokes and buy products that work against Chinese slaves is even worse than what the Europeans did to the Africans 300 years ago. At least the Europeans of that era did not have any scientific knowledge that African people were full fledged human beings. Africans know Chinese are real people but some don't care.


    Paul wrote on August 29, 2008 08:13 PM: Chris Rock is funny, but if a white comedian made the same jokes about black people, Al Sharpton and Jesse Baby Daddy would have a fit. White people are the only group who are emotionally equipped to handle other groups laughing at them!