Growing Up Laughing Page 7

  —M.T.

  Marlo: To be a successful nightclub comic, you have to have a lot of energy. But you have more energy than almost anyone I’ve ever seen. Most guys stay pretty close to the mike. You pace wildly back and forth, stalking the audience like a caged tiger. Why is that? What is that?

  Chris: Basically I’m trying to be a good director.

  Marlo: Meaning?

  Chris: Meaning, if you’re standing in one place, a person can turn away from you to say something to their friend, and then when they turn back you’re right where they left you. But if you’re walking around, they can’t say anything to their friend. They have to pay attention.

  Marlo: That’s really interesting.

  Chris: Yeah. I think [Eddie] Murphy was the one who told me that.

  Marlo: And when you stop, we really pay attention.

  Chris: Right. You stop on the punch line—and pow! It’s walk-walk, plant, deliver punch line.

  Marlo: Have you always moved back and forth like that?

  Chris: You know, it’s one of those things that, once I figured it out, it catapulted me. You learn a lot doing stand-up. First, you think it’s all just about jokes. “All I need is jokes. If I have the best ones, this will work.” Then if you’re in it long enough, you realize that the guys who are actually the best performers go the furthest.

  Marlo: And the guys with the best jokes?

  Chris: They write for other people.

  Marlo: Right.

  Chris: So, you watch. And you get passed by some guys, and you learn from them. My friend Paul always says, “Competition keeps you in condition.”

  Marlo: That’s right.

  Chris: I remember before I cracked, I went to see Martin Lawrence at Radio City. And, you know, that was something—seeing somebody at Radio City who’s your age, who started the same time as you, and he’s playing in front of six thousand people while you’re still playing in front of three hundred. You can be bitter and think there’s some conspiracy against you, or you can sit there and learn.

  Marlo: You’re often compared to Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. That’s a tough standard to live up to.

  Chris: But those guys are better performers than me. They really are. They’ve got these great voices, great characters, and then they put jokes around those characters, where I just kind of start with the joke. But that doesn’t faze me. I remember seeing Cosby one time and it was, like, one of the best shows I’d ever seen. It made me mad, like, “Uch, God, what am I doing with my life? How could this guy be so good?” And I said that to him when I went backstage after the show. And he said, “Well, of course I’m better than you. I’ve been doing this thirty years longer than you. What do you expect?”

  Marlo: In Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary, The Comedian, you come backstage and talk to Jerry about that. In the film, Jerry has been putting his act together, beat by beat, joke by joke, and you tell him you just saw two hours straight of Cosby, with all new material.

  Chris: All new. All great. Confident.

  Marlo: Right. And Seinfeld’s face just falls. At this point, he has six minutes of new material, and that’s all. We know exactly how he feels. But you not only keep coming up with new material, you also have something different from Pryor and Murphy. What do you think that is?

  Chris: I guess just a different set of experiences. I didn’t spend that much time on the chitlin circuit, so as a comic, I’m kind of raised by Jews, essentially. I was around guys like Robert Klein and David Brenner. I’m one of the rare black comics who got to spend a lot of time with Jewish comics. And because of that, I can perform just about anywhere.

  Marlo: Like a lot of black comedians, you take white people to task. But you spend equal time taking black people to task.

  Chris: I take everybody to task.

  Marlo: Right. When I watch you on stage, I think there’s got to be a preacher in your family somewhere because . . .

  Chris: Oh, yeah—my grandfather.

  Marlo: You’re kidding me!

  Chris: My grandfather and my great-grandfather.

  Marlo: That’s so funny. I was actually joking—but when I watch you, I think, My God, this guy is sermonizing to people. “Don’t drop out of school. Get a job. Be responsible for your kids. Don’t hit women.” I mean, there’s a whole moral code there, just like with preachers.

  Chris: I like preachers. They’re essentially doing the same kind of gig as me, just not trying to get a laugh. And we’re both trying to hold people’s attention.

  Marlo: Right, and to lead them.

  Chris: And to lead them. One of these days I want to do one big sermon as a TV special. A sermon can be about one topic for an hour and ten minutes. I would love to try to pull that off as a comedian. Literally talk about just one thing.

  Marlo: I’m sure you could pull it off. You obviously picked up a lot from your grandfather.

  Chris: Well, I spent a lot of time with him when he was preaching. He was like one of my best friends. He had tons of talent and used to preach on the weekends. He’d drive a cab during the week, and I’d sit with him in the front of the cab. And he would never write the sermon—he would just write the bullet points, then kind of rip the sermon. And I write my jokes in the same way. The important thing is what I want to talk about. We’ll figure out how to make this funny later, but right now, the most important thing is the topic.

  Marlo: Exactly. Like your jokes about our having so much food in our country, that we have the luxury of being allergic to it. You say, “There’s no dairy intolerance in Africa.” That’s such a great observation. Was your grandfather also funny?

  Chris: Oh, he was hysterical, hysterical. Some people are just accidentally funny, but he loved being funny.

  Marlo: In his sermons?

  Chris: A little bit in his sermons, but mostly in his life. He was kind of a Mr. Magoo, and full of contradictions—he was a reverend, he went to jail, he cheated on my grandmother constantly, just loved the ladies. One of those complete guys.

  Marlo: Did he get to see you be funny on stage?

  Chris: A little bit, but he never got to come to a big house. He was gone before I bought the big house.

  Marlo: Did he tell you jokes?

  Chris: No, he never told me jokes. My whole family’s humor was mostly about how bad they were going to kick somebody’s ass that day.

  Marlo: Like?

  Chris: Like, my brother once told a guy, “I’m going to beat you so bad you’ll be the only guy in heaven in a wheelchair”—and you knew he meant it. He wasn’t telling a joke.

  Marlo: Beat-up humor. That’s a new one.

  Chris: Yeah. My family never, never ran out of ass-kick metaphors.

  Marlo: Tell me about your dad. You revealed a little bit about your relationship with him in your TV show, Everybody Hates Chris.

  Chris: Yeah, same thing as my grandfather—he liked being funny. But my father was a straight guy. He didn’t chase women. He was his own guy. I don’t know how to explain my father. He was a teamster and the person they would always send somewhere to be the first black guy to work at that place. Because he could take it.

  Marlo: Take what?

  Chris: The abuse.

  Marlo: Physical abuse?

  Chris: Sometimes physical. Sometimes verbal. He was the first black driver at Rangel Brewery, the first one at the Daily News . . .

  Marlo: A stand-up guy.

  Chris: A real stand-up guy—and they knew he could take it. Long story short: At any factory job or wherever, somebody always sells coke. Somebody is always in charge of drugs. It’s their territory and nobody else is allowed to sell them. Well, my father’s friends were selling coke at the Daily News, and my father was the one guy who decided that he wasn’t going to do it. And these were all guys I grew up with—I called them “Uncle.” And they ended up going to jail. But not my dad—he was home.

  Marlo: That takes a lot of nerve. Was he a big guy physically?

  Chris: Yeah, he
was pretty big. But everybody’s dad is big to them.

  Marlo: What I mean is, he was the guy you knew could take care of himself in a fight.

  Chris: Yeah, but to “take it” meant, if somebody hit you, you didn’t do anything back. That’s what they meant by “take it.” They wanted the guy who wasn’t going to get in a riot, or end up getting killed.

  Marlo: He must have had a big influence on you.

  Chris: Yeah, it rubs off. I can definitely “take” show business. My God, what the hell. If you can’t deal with “no,” if you can’t deal with abuse, you know you’re in the wrong business.

  Marlo: And what was your mom like?

  Chris: My mom is funny—she’s still funny. Well, not as funny now because she’s trying to get into heaven.

  Marlo: You mean she used to be dirty funny?

  Chris: Yeah, but not sexual dirty. My mother used to curse up a storm. But if you mention that to her now, she’s like, “What are you talking about? I never cursed.”

  Marlo: That’s so funny. You know, something you do that I find really charming—and I haven’t seen any other comedian do this except Red Skelton: You’re often delighted with your own joke. Red would laugh after he said something funny, and you do that, too, sometimes.

  Chris: But you know what? I’m laughing with the audience. I just like to see them laugh, especially those people who haven’t laughed in a while—and you can spot them because they’re laughing so hard. I like shocking a crowd. I like it when the wife hits the husband because he’s laughing that shame laugh. That I can’t believe he said that! laugh.

  Marlo: All of the man-woman stuff you do is wonderful. Like when you say, “You ladies, you know your man better than he knows himself. You know what kind of man you have.” You can just see the women in the audience loving it.

  Chris: Because it’s true! “You knew that if you didn’t sleep with him for a month, something was bound to happen. You knew this wasn’t the guy to go on strike with. But you did it anyway!”

  Marlo: Just great. Your act is beautifully crafted. You know, when I was a kid, I was fascinated by watching how my father crafted his material. I always thought of him as a cross between an orchestra conductor and a bullfighter.

  Chris: Yeah, well, you won’t get bloody, but you can get hurt up there.

  Marlo: Do you map out everything ahead of time, or do you figure it out on your feet?

  Chris: It evolves. The average HBO special that you watch, that guy has probably done that material in 30 concerts. For every special I’ve done, I must have done at least 120 shows.

  Marlo: So you know what works.

  Chris: I know what works, but I play with it, too. I don’t lock in on show number 30 and do the same thing. I play with the order. “Okay, I’m going to do all the relationship stuff first tonight.” Or, “Okay, I’m not going to curse tonight.” I just play with all of it and see how the act works inside and out. You’ve got to make it like a movie, especially when you play the big houses. Your mentality has to be a little different.

  Marlo: In what way?

  Chris: When you’re in a club, you can do a quilt of jokes and get away with it. You can go from joke to joke to joke, and do that for fifty minutes—people are pretty impressed by that, and it’s a fine feat. But if you’re at Radio City Music Hall or Madison Square Garden, you have to have a show.

  Marlo: Right.

  Chris: You’re standing in the same spot Prince was two nights earlier. And your ticket price isn’t that much different from his. So it can’t just be joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. I mean, you have to get the laughs from the joke, joke, joke, but it’s got to be more like a movie. And the houses help. I mean, you’re not competing with a waitress, and it’s all set up for you. So you should take that extra time and really use it to get that extra laugh.

  Marlo: In a way, you’re a lot like Lenny Bruce. He was very shocking at the time, mostly because of his language. But when you look back at it now, what he was basically saying to people was: “Wake up! Look at what’s going on in this country and in this world.” You do that, too.

  Chris: I try. I’ve seen Lenny Bruce. This YouTube invention is the greatest thing of all time—punch up any comedian you want. Sometimes I’ll sit for hours, just watching comics.

  Marlo: What do you learn from them?

  Chris: That the times can dictate a comedian’s impact—that the years in which someone is doing comedy can help the comedian as much as anything else. Richard Pryor is great, don’t get me wrong, but the times he was performing in—my God! How could you mess up in that era? Look at what the country was going through then. How could you not be great during segregation? Then you’ve got a guy like Eddie Murphy, who’s great, but it wasn’t really a deep time when he was on stage. By the eighties, the struggle was over for the most part, you know what I mean? It was a different time. Lenny Bruce was part of such a great time. Probably no comedian has been of a better time, really.

  Marlo: You seem to have no trouble finding social issues to talk about, either. I laughed hard at your piece about blacks and Jews, where you say that blacks don’t hate Jews, they hate white people. You talk about not putting everyone in little categories, which allows us to laugh at our own prejudices. That’s a very brave and honest thing to say, and it helps to bang down doors. You also did a very strong piece about “blacks versus niggers,” which you’ve since retired. Why?

  Chris: I’m always retiring stuff. That’s the downside of the YouTube era; people can watch your act at any moment, and you can’t be up there doing old stuff. You used to be able to write an act then ride that act for twenty years.

  Marlo: That’s what my dad and all those guys of his era did. Tell me about school. Were you the funny kid?

  Chris: No, I barely spoke. I was bused to school, and was the only black boy in my grade for five or six years—there were two girls. It was scary, but that’s what was going on in ’73. You could still be the first black kid somewhere, even in the seventies.

  Marlo: So if you weren’t funny at school, when did you start figuring out you could make people laugh?

  Chris: I was always interested in being funny. I was a weird kid. I remember I could watch any TV show and tell you exactly what the next joke was.

  Marlo: Really?

  Chris: Really. Even when I was eight years old, I would watch a brand-new show and say, “Okay, now they’re going to say this . . .” And I always loved comedians. I couldn’t wait to see The Dean Martin Roast. What kid wants to watch a Dean Martin roast? Couldn’t wait. And I loved Alan King. Black kid in Bed Stuy worshipping Alan King.

  Marlo: What about your uncles? You once said that uncles prepare you for life.

  Chris: They do.

  Marlo: That there’s the alcoholic uncle, and the gay uncle, and the stealing uncle. Did you observe this in your own family?

  Chris: Yeah, all those uncles. I have an uncle who’s a surgeon, too, but, you know, that’s not funny. He always gets left out.

  Marlo: You talk a lot about men and women on stage. You say, “When you meet somebody, you’re actually only meeting their representative, because all men lie, and all women have hair extensions, makeup, and heels.” That kind of comment could be offensive, especially to women, but the women in your audiences really seem to love it. How do you do that?

  Chris: You’ve got to include the women in on the joke.

  Marlo: Meaning?

  Chris: Meaning, when I’m on stage doing relationship stuff, I’m essentially a woman comedian.

  Marlo: Ah-hah.

  Chris: There are very few jokes I do on relationships that a woman couldn’t do. I remember Martin Lawrence once telling me that, unless you’re AC/DC, there’s always going to be more women in the crowd.

  Marlo: Really?

  Chris: Yeah. And so you want jokes that get the hard laughs, not just the cute laughs—because most humor that’s directed towards women is kind of cutesy. Some comedians assume t
hat the women at their shows were dragged there by men, but I approach the women in my audiences as if they actually came to see me. Because women like to laugh hard, too.

  Marlo: We sure do. In watching your concerts, what I found most shocking was your take on O. J. Simpson. You actually make the argument that you understood why he may have committed murder. You run through the whole thing—he’s paying twenty-five thousand a month in alimony, another guy is driving his car, he’s paying the mortgage and the guy is coming to his house. You say, “He shouldn’t have killed her—but I understand.” I was floored by that. Weren’t you afraid people would stone you for saying a thing like that?

  Chris: It’s funny, I never had any problems with that joke. With lots of jokes, it’s like, “Oh, man, I’ve got to figure out how to get this one right.” Like the niggers and black thing. When you don’t have that joke right, it’s the worst joke ever. I was dying every night. People were walking out, cursing me out. But never with the O.J. joke. Everybody laughs at it. And the important thing is, even women laugh at it because . . .

  Marlo: Because they understand jealousy?

  Chris: Yeah, and let’s not kid ourselves here. We’re not supposed to murder, but let’s not act like none of us ever thought about killing somebody. I mean, most of us have a switch that says you can’t do that. O.J.’s switch did not go off that day.

  Marlo: So, in a way, that gives you the license to do a joke like that.

  Chris: Right.

  Marlo: Which a lot of other comedians might shy away from.

  Chris: Look, when you listen to the news, you realize that it’s so much easier to report things as black or white. But the world is not black and white. The world is grey.

  Chapter 15

  Beverly Hills, My Neighborhood

  The words Beverly Hills conjure up Rodeo Drive, Hollywood and glamour. But for the kids who grew up there, it was just our neighborhood.