If you have to say you’re edgy, you’re not: Chris Rock

“I’m just thinking about making people laugh. I hate when guys talk about ‘I’m edgy.’ The worst comics think that way. It’s not edgy if you’re talking about it! You just live it.”
— Chris Rock

Chris Rock is perhaps the most famous comedian or comic of my generation. We were born a few weeks apart, and grew up in completely different circumstances. I grew up in a homogenous bubble of eastern Newfoundland, and Rock grew up in Brooklyn, one of the first Black kids to be bused to a white school.

That traumatic experience — of learning that he was hated because of race alone — filled him with a rage that fuelled his comedy. Some of his best-known lines from his routines — “When you white, the sky is the limit. When you black, the limit’s the sky” — are drawn right out of his experiences.

Eventually, as Rock began performing, he saw more of the world, and learned to temper his feelings. In an interview with Rolling Stone (the quote above is also drawn from it), he said:

So there’s a cloud of rage around me, but being an artist kind of changes that. No matter what you thought coming in, what ignorant thing you believed, you’re in show business for two years, you’re like, “OK, I was wrong.” It’s hard to be mad at any particular group of people when you’re an artist.

Rock’s childhood experience also inspired the 2000s sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, a somewhat autobiographical take made a family comedy out of what could also have been a dark drama.

Several years ago, when Rock was appearing in the series Fargo, he said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that he had embraced therapy (which he had mocked), in part to deal with the fallout of a divorce, but also to repair himself from the inside out. And, as the article notes, to reassess “the childhood traumas he once joked about.”

Rock’s description of edginess clocks with his onstage persona, and it also seems to fit what was really going on inside, too, for so many years. “I had this great combination of big ego and low self-esteem,” he said in that 2020 interview.

“And the ego gets you out onstage, but the low self-esteem is the thing that makes you practice so much because you don’t believe in yourself at all. You think you’re a total f–king fraud — and you don’t think anybody could love you for being you, so you have to be good at this thing.”

Chris Rock’s style of comedy is still caustic, and I think that’s what audiences expect when they buy a ticket or watch a special.

That said, I’m glad to see that he’s lighter on himself.