In Top Five, Chris Rock plays movie star Andre Allen, who, after a stint in rehab and a box-office failure, is attempting a career comeback. In the film, one of Allen s biggest hurdles is that he no longer feels funny. But in real life, of course, Rock doesn t appear to have that problem. Though his films have been hit-or-miss, the comedian s stand-up has been consistently hilarious for three decades. With Top Five opening today, we picked our top five Chris Rock stand-up clips.
1. Marriage and its discontents are featured heavily in Rock’s comedy. In this clip, Rock goes on a rant about having to deal with other boring married couples and the impossibility of finding a soul mate with the exact same interests—in his case, that would be Seinfeld and Wu-Tang Clan.
2. In this early clip, Rock is only 23 (and wearing a particularly unsightly eighties sweater), but you can already see the elements of his style—the repetition, the pacing back and forth—that are now hallmarks of his routine.
3. Not a lot of people could extract humor from gun control, but in this bit from Bigger Blacker, Rock pulls it off, and even presents an inventive economics-based solution for addressing gun violence in America.
4. In this joke from his 2008 special Kill the Messenger, Rock acknowledges the absurdity and double-standards of fame and takes a shot at the affluent neighborhood he lives in.
5. In this recent Saturday Night Live opening monologue, Rock—never one to shy away from a sensitive topic—riffs on the new One World Trade Center, the Boston Marathon, and the commercialization of Christmas.