Despite the pinstriped suit he’s wearing, comedian Chris Rock casually sits with one foot up on his chair and his chin resting on his knee in the Red Room of Miami’s Shore Club hotel. He talks softly–except when he’s cracking jokes–and it’s hard to believe that this is the same person who prowls the stage and screams into the mike at his live shows. Out of the spotlight, the comedian, who makes his directing debut with the new movie Head of State (he produced and stars as well), comes off like a pretty low-key kind of guy.
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So Is That Really Him Up There?
Rock is quick to point out that while his onstage personality isn’t as much of an exaggeration as, say, Andrew Dice Clay‘s Diceman, it’s still a little more outrageous than good old everyday Chris Rock.
“Probably 80 percent of it, especially when I talk about personal experiences…is like, dead-on true,” he says. “Most of the views are kind of how I feel. Sometimes I’ll stretch a view, just for a joke. Like, ‘Nah, I don’t believe this, but boy is it funny!'”
And at the risk of stating the obvious, being funny is really the point of being a comedian. It’s not, as Rock emphatically states, about being political, making a statement or being a role model. It’s about making people laugh.
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Rock and Role Models
In fact, Rock thinks bad role models are good.
“I think Daryl Strawberry saved my life,” he said, referring to the New York Yankees slugger who got busted for cocaine possession and solicitation in 1999. “‘Cause it’s not like guys don’t get punished for their dirty deeds. It’s not like, ‘Yeah, yeah, he smoked crack and now he’s playing today.’ They always get punished, and that’s all the kids need to see.”
Strawberry shares responsibility for Rock‘s good behavior with the comedian’s parents. “I behave because I have a mother and father who raised me right,” he says.
Family Matters
They also raised him funny.
“We’re a pretty humorous family, the Rocks,” he says. “The whole family was kind of funny, so it wasn’t like I stood out. I wasn’t any funnier than my dad or my brother or my uncles.”
This humorous family is also pretty fearless. With two generations of preachers to its credit (Rock‘s grandfather and his great-grandfather), the Rocks aren’t afraid to get up in front of a crowd and say what they believe, and that’s something Rock has done consistently on stage and screen since he first decided to become a comedian after watching Eddie Murphy‘s 1983 concert video Delirious. From his 1996 career-making HBO special Bring the Pain to The Chris Rock Show to 1999’s Bigger and Blacker, Rock has been telling it like it is to anyone who wants to listen, and one of his perennial themes is that every community needs strong leaders–in fact, the idea is so important to him, he made a movie about it.
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President Rock
In Head of State, which opens nationwide on March 28, Rock plays Mays Gilliam, an unknown alderman from Washington, D.C., who campaigns to become the leader of the free world, the President of the United States.
When Rock first got the idea for a movie about a black presidential candidate, he was an aspiring comedian working the clubs in New York City, and Geraldine Ferraro had recently run for Vice President.
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He describes the scenario during that election year as very similar to the one portrayed in the film: a party chooses a candidate knowing they’re bound to lose but hoping they’ll look good down the line.
Rock had to look down the line, too, before he could get this picture made. Aside from needing to become famous, “You can’t really run for President when you’re 23,” he says. “So [there’s] no need to write that movie up, ’cause the studio’s gonna say, ‘You’re too young.’ And they’ll give it to Eddie Murphy or something.”
As Rock rose to the top of his field, black politicians like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were rising in theirs, too. The clock was ticking, and Rock decided he’d better make the movie before one of them made it into the highest office in the land and made his movie moot.
Not that Head of State is necessarily about a successful black politician; at least, the color of Gilliam’s skin isn’t really supposed to be the focus, according to Rock.
“The way the guy runs is not really black; it’s just alternative. It’s black. It’s white. It’s gay. It’s straight. You know what I mean? He goes everywhere…. He’s got the women with the babies… I mean, he’s working it, working all the angles.”
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“Rock” the Vote
Above all, Mays motivates his base, which includes–in addition to women with babies– the prostitutes that co-star Bernie Mac (Mays’s brother and running mate) shepherds to the polls on election day and the guests at the Players’ Club party where the pink-tuxedoed candidate espouses every woman’s right to work, whatever her chosen profession.
And “Rock”ing every vote–even from the prostitute/pimp lobby–is important.
“In a good year, in a good election, only half the country votes,” Rock accurately states. “So what if you could get that half and 40 percent of the other half that don’t vote? You really might be able to do something.”
Be Funny First
But don’t let that do-gooder attitude fool you; Head of State is first and foremost a funny, funny movie–and that’s exactly how Rock planned it.
“You gotta have the jokes first,” he insists. “A lot of people try to be political, and end up boring. It can be so boring…. People don’t wanna hear, ‘Go see this movie, it’s positive.’ People wanna hear it’s funny or it’s good. People don’t want medicine, even though medicine makes you better. You need medicine.”
In the Service of the State
As far as real-life politics go, Rock told us the closest the movie gets to them is its battalion of “superwhores” trained to “service” any presidential whim and thereby avoid the sex scandals that plagued the last administration.
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“I like Bill Clinton,” Rock tells us. “So I didn’t want to make fun of him. But you almost had to acknowledge it…. I can almost be sure there’s something like that now–some secretary or somebody, working, covert. She’s been [told], ‘These are your duties. We can’t have happen to us what happened to them.'”
Getting the Message Out
Like the movies that inspired it–Take the Money and Run, Bananas, The Hudsucker Proxy and Dr. Strangelove, which Rock describes as “silly movies with serious undertones”–Head of State, in keeping with Rock‘s stance on comedy and politics, gets at its moral in a roundabout way.
“I think [when people leave the theater] they’ll think about things,” Rock says. “They’ll think about the woman in the hotel that she can’t stay in, and the security guard in the mall he can’t shop in,” both situations that Mays discusses on the campaign trail.
They may also think about the message Mays delivers to the mothers and their babies he kissed along the way, a hilarious homage to the family that “raised him right”: “Knock out your kids! It helps!”
Now that Rock‘s a proud papa himself (his daughter Lola Simone was born last year), we suspect this is one of those views he’s exaggerating to make a point.
But boy, is it funny.
