WIfey and I watched the Chris Rock comedy special on Netflix last weekend for the main reason most everyone else did: To see if he'd say anything about Will Smith and to see if Rock has gotten any funnier.
He did and he hasn't.
I try to keep in mind that I'm a middle class, middle aged, white guy from one of the whitest states around, and that I may not be his target audience. But I used to think his HBO specials were pretty funny. Yet, Saturday night, I thought he was funny maybe a third of the time. Seemed to recycle some old stuff.
I'm no delicate flower and appreciate off-color humor with the best of them but swearing for the sake of swearing and trying to be crude just to be crude and not out of necessity for the joke to work, doesn't work for me. Repeating the same "naughty" word ten times and shouting it a little louder each time, doesn't make it funnier. It makes you annoying. And screaming the word white people aren't supposed to say a thousand times in an hour is cringe-worthy to me.
To me, an amateur psychiatrist, Rock has some serious issues. Half the time he talked about how rich he was, the other half how much sex he has. Kinda made me doubt he's really all that. Then the last ten minutes he spent on Will Smith and "the slap" was kind of like watching a person come unhinged right in front of you. It was like I was a fly on the wall of his therapist visit.
It was uncomfortable and sad and not funny. He had a meltdown worthy of any of the Housewife shows, but it didn't seem contrived like theirs. You could tell he was genuinely embarrassed by the slap, probably by the fact he didn't fight back, and that everybody in the world saw it.
But instead of paying his therapist to fix him, he made us all pay to watch him be embarrassed again.
Made me wish Rock hadn't been wearing a necklace with Prince's love and peace symbol. There was no love and no peace Saturday night. And, worse yet for a comedy special, mighty few laughs.
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