A great performance by Chris Rock!!! So smart, so funny! He floundered here and there, but there were moments of brilliance that had me laughing out loud. Thought provoking in a way few comics would dare to go. And of course, the last 10 minutes about Will and Jada Smith was historic, brutal, but historic. The after show was mostly lame, although it was nice to see Arsenio again.
I watched about the first 20 minutes wanting very much to laugh my butt off but found not very funny. His jokes about wokeness, and people addicted to wanting attention I found just tired. I finally had to move on to something else. I tried to skip forward to the part about the Smiths but for some reason couldn’t. I’ll try to watch more tomorrow but if its more of the trying to makes about the obvious(The Lu Lu Lemon yoga pants bit I just found boring and dumb) I don’t know if I’ll make it. Again I really like Rock and have found him funny in the past so I’m hoping.
I only saw a clip of it online, the one about Will and Jada, but that was wild. I can just imagine the heads of those two exploding, while Rock rakes in the applause and the money he will make from this. And the beauty for Rock is that you know just about every comedian will have his back, as the last thing any of them want is idiots from the crowd jumping up on stage and assaulting them for a joke the way Smith did.
Not a great set. A lot of the time just repeating what he was trying to get across. Also he needs to stop all the screaming, had to turn down the volume because of his voice. I know it is nothing new for him, but it was a lot worse than before. If not for the Smith closing section, it would have been way below average performance.
I enjoyed the special, but I also noticed a ton of repeated lines and the screaming. I wondered if he was repeating the material so they'd have options when they created the edit for streaming...but nope, I watched the edit and there is still a lot of repetition.
Thanks to this thread I have just added "Chris Rock: Selective Outrage" to "my list" on Netflix and will watch it soon. I also noticed that there are a couple more Chris Rock stand-up specials on Netflix, hopefully they're all funny.
I just watched the Will Smith bit, well done. I can't stand too much of Rocks annoying yelling, so that's probably all I'll watch.
I found it more interesting than funny. I didn’t find myself laughing at all, but I was interested in it nonetheless.
"My wife has exactly as much money as me. And she ain't even funny". The bits about his wife, and those about their daughter were pretty funny. As for the rebuttal to Will & Jada... freakin' priceless. Take THAT.
Chris Rock is an average comedian and this show was another example. All that time to prepare and so many dead sequences, nothing extraordinary and lots of cliche. For getting uncontrollable laughs from places you never dreamed, he is no Richard Pryor and for savage, insightful commentary, he is no George Carlin. He seems to be more like a Don Rickles light. And by light, I mean Don Rickles provides more punchlines in five minutes than Chris Rock in an hour.
I’m not sure either but thought I would throw it out there. But when he is roasting people and he likes to do this, he seems to need a lot of words to do so.
I thought it was great, all through. I watched it the next morning, but since it was still unedited it was kind of neat hearing the flubs, which were extremely slight. I am wondering if his family really found out about the thing he said from watching the special!
I haven't watched the new show yet, but I did watch a YouTube clip of the part about the Smiths, and was reminded of the advice never to get into an argument with someone who buys ink by the car load. I'm not sure where he is currently, but I disagree with the idea that at his best Chris Rock was anything less than the equal of Richard Pryor and George Carlin in terms of social commentary. His 12 minute bit from Bring The Pain was astounding, and easily the equal of anything by those two gentlemen. I haven't been able to find the article, but at the time, the New Yorker made the point that Rock's comedy was actually profoundly conservative, so it's not the slightest bit surprising to find him taking issue with a concept of "wokeness."