Across the street from the Hilton Hotel, the ICC is a formidable place. From the outside, it looks like a massive wall of lights – the reason for load-shedding, moth Mecca, the City of Light. Inside, the massive gilded hall looked more like an air-hangar scattered with 1000s of fancy plastic chairs, custom-designed for heavy laughter – like rubberised, earthquake-friendly buildings in Taiwan. And that little rubber joint, between the base and backrest, was for a reason. In May, Chris Rock broke the Guinness World Record for the highest attendance at a UK comedy show when he played to 15,000 fans at London's O2 Arena. Time Magazine calls him, “The funniest man in America.” And, when he finally walked, no, strutted out in Durban, you knew you were in the presence of standup comedy royalty.
First up though was Mario Joyner, Rock's comedy fluffer, or as he put it to the streamloads of people pouring in through the side and rear entrances for most of his warmup show, “Don't worry. That's why they send me out here. So people can find their seats before the real show starts.”
Joyner is a longtime Chris Rock friend and collaborator, most famous for his cameos on Everybody Hates Chris and Seinfeld. At first, I thought he was going to be just some dude they sent out to make Rock sound even funnier. But, flick-flacking across trivial, mundane, irritates-the-shit-out-of-everybody gags – like a blacker, more sober version of Mitch Hedberg – Joyner was hysterical;
“These days you can get laser eye surgery. LASER, IN YOUR EYE! But prostate exam – finger in the ass. A finger isn't even an instrument. It's what you use when you don't have an instrument. Is nobody working on any advancements in this area?”
“I hate having to run around to try and trap a weak signal. And the phone companies try and make you feel like it's your fault. 'Hang on, I'm getting a bad signal.' No you're not, they're sending you a bad signal. What the hell is a bad area? If I'm in an area, and I have a phone, that's a good area to make a call in.”
“What's up with the mute button on phones? That must have been a great day for the mutes, when they all got together, marched down to the phone company, and told them their demands. I know mute people are handicapped and stuff. And you're not supposed to make fun of them. But I told that joke to a bunch of mute people, and they didn't say anything.”
Joyner's bit was short, fresh, and to the point. And, with jokes like, “I'm 46-years old. And I'm dating a woman half my age. You've got to try dating a person half your age. But wait till you're older. Or it's kind of illegal,” “It's only a mid-life crisis if you can't pull it off,” and “I live by myself, living alone sounds bad,” you know that he's living one of those enviable Henry Rollins, Russell Peters, eternally single, travel-the-world lives that society frowns upon; “People always ask me, why aren't you married? BECAUSE I WANNA STAY HAPPY! Married people are so devious. They just wanna try and trick you into joining their miserable little club.”
His act only lasted fifteen minutes, but he's a comic I'm definitely going to be researching; “Gotta watch the time. Chris don't like it when you go over. He'll dock yah.”
Click here to watch Mario ripping Steven Segal a new one
“PUSSY COSTS MONEY. BUT DICK'S FOR FREE”
The lights went out. A giant green money backdrop appeared, with a crest-looking CR logo. Rap music started blaring around the hall. And suddenly, pint-sized comedy legend Chris Rock was onstage. Buck toothed, nasal, and OH-ffensive as hell.
Rock started out joking about meeting Nelson Mandela, “It was an honour being around Mr. Mandela, but we don't really have a lot in common. He's 79 (89), I'm 41. He spent 27 years in prison, I worked at a Red Lobster for four months. I didn't know what the fuck to say to him. 'So, have you got that new iPhone?'”
One of his funniest bits was the American elections; “Barack Obama! That's about the blackest name I ever heard. Second only to Dikembe Mutombo (Congolese-born American basketball player). When you hear Barack Obama, you picture a brother holding a spear, standing over a dead lion and shit.”
Dipping into the black versus white jokes he's most famous for, Rock added, “Barack has one handicap to overcome that none of the other candidates have. He's got a black wife. Now I think a black woman could be president all she wants, but she can't be no first lady. A black woman cannot be in the background of any relationship – 'You won? Don't you mean we won'. If Barack wants to win. He's gonna have to get himself a white girl. Look what it did for Tiger Woods.” At that point, the black woman next to me shouted, “Look what it did for Tokyo (Sexwale).”
Rock continued to discuss the intricacies of the black-man-wanting-a-white-woman, black-women- hating-black-men-that-prefer-white-women debate; “A black man likes a big white girl. Any black man will dropkick Keira Knightley to the curb to get to Rosie O'Donnel.”
Another classic downtrodden-black people joke he told was about his own neighbourhood; “My house costs millions of dollars – don't hate the player, hate the game – but in my whole neighbourhood, there are only four black people; Me, Denzel Washington, Mary J. Blige, and Jay-Z. Do you know what my white neighbour does? He's a dentist. And he aint even the world's best dentist. He's just a regular, yank-your-tooth-out dentist. Another example of how the black man has to fly, to get to where the white man has to walk to.”
Rock continued to offend as many people as he could for an hour and a half, finally ending with these “pearls” of wisdom; “I remember the first time a woman sucked the cum out of my dick and swallowed it. It was amazing. Now, half the people in here are disgusted. The other half are in loving relationships. Spitters are quitters. Remember that, SPITTERS ARE QUITTERS. I'm outta here.”
Rock's show was a little shorter than I'd expected. And his South Africa references were limited to talking about how many goals Shaun Pollock scored? (I was sure he was going to talk about Xenophobia). But Chris Rock is one funny little whiny bastard. The crown prince of stylish comedians. And, a great way to spend a Tuesday night. If you can, and you can afford it, make sure you see him in action.
Interestingly, in an interview with news website CTV.ca, Rock said that he didn't consider the Xenophobic attacks black on black violence. Instead, he calls them “broke on broke violence. It's poor people robbing each other.”
A FEW MORE CHRIS ROCK CLASSICS FROM DURBAN:
“I wanna do a good show. 'Cos I don't want the authorities to come and take my kids away. Did you see what they did to Britney Spears? They just took her kids. And gave them to her broke ass husband. And I realised, they take white kids away a lot quicker. Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, they kept the kids. Shit, even OJ Simpson kept the kids, and he MURDERED the mother! I saw OJ on TV talking about how hard it is to be a single parent. But OJ, you killed the mother!”
“Is America ready for a black president? Is America ready for a woman president? We should be, we just had a retarded one.”
When discussing 71-year-old American presidential candidate John McCain, “He's so old he used to own Sidney Poitier”.
“Hillary Clinton is so forgiving, even Jesus is like, 'Shit, you're forgiving. I talk the talk, but you walk the walk.”
“Do you know how big your ego has to be to run for president? Do you know how much Puff Daddy juice you have to drink. Do you know how many Kanye injections you need to take? Imagine you're walking out of a KFC, and your friend turns to you and says 'You know who should run everything? Me!'”
“Part of me even hates my own kids. The rich brats. I grew up dirt poor”.
