<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Originally published in the March 2011 issue Nick &amp;amp;amp; Toni&amp;#039;s Caf\u00E9, Upper West Side, lunch, December 3, 2010. SCOTT RAAB: Is that your iPad? CHRIS ROCK: Why would you go anyplace without your iPad? This is the greatest invention. When it gets a little more power, my God. It&amp;#039;s like my office. [The waitress comes over: &amp;quot;Water to start with? Sparkling, still, tap water?&amp;quot;] CR: You know what? Tap water. I&amp;#039;m tappy today. How&amp;#039;s tappy? It&amp;#039;s Bloomberg&amp;#039;s best, right? I&amp;#039;ll take that. SR: The magazine&amp;#039;s buying, man. Have some Pellegrino. CR: I&amp;#039;m okay. I&amp;#039;m tap. I&amp;#039;m tap.  SR: Will I see you at the Garden for the Heat game? CR: No, I&amp;#039;m going to St. Martin.  SR: Could I have the seat? CR: I already gave it up. SR: I&amp;#039;m writing a book about LeBron. I&amp;#039;m a Cleveland guy. I&amp;#039;m mad at him. CR: I don&amp;#039;t even see what the big story is. SR: Cleveland&amp;#039;s hurting, Chris. CR: Cleveland deserves to hurt. I said that wrong. Deservedly so, hurts. But I&amp;#039;m telling you, weather alone should&amp;#039;ve been cause for panic. SR: He&amp;#039;s got a LOYALTY tattoo. CR: Loyalty to friends. And all his friends are right there. God bless him. SR: They all wanted him to stay. CR: No, they didn&amp;#039;t. They all wanted to go. And by the way, he&amp;#039;s surrounded by six 25-year-old black guys \u2014 where do you think they want to be? They want to be in Miami.  SR: I know that you&amp;#039;re right. I&amp;#039;m just having a hard time getting over it. CR: It&amp;#039;s the weather, dude. I can&amp;#039;t believe no one&amp;#039;s written that article. If Dwyane Wade played in Milwaukee, LeBron would not be in fucking Milwaukee. SR: I believe that. Chicago I thought was possible...  CR: He was not going to Chicago. What&amp;#039;s the point? It was all about the fucking weather.  WEB EXCLUSIVE: Raab and Chris Rock Talk (Much) More About LeBron &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; SR: When&amp;#039;s the last time you toured as a stand-up? CR: About three years now. SR: You miss it? CR: I&amp;#039;m looking forward to doing it again. But touring&amp;#039;s hard. When you&amp;#039;ve got kids, it&amp;#039;s a big undertaking. It&amp;#039;s like doing four movies in a row. It&amp;#039;s the whole world now; it&amp;#039;s not just the States. SR: The comics I&amp;#039;ve talked to have varied styles as stand-ups, but the throughline is that it&amp;#039;s the most intense thing they&amp;#039;ve ever done. CR: Yeah. A lot of guys are great, but they don&amp;#039;t want to hit hard. To hit like Tyson up there, that shit is \u2014 I just presented some award to Oprah at the Kennedy Center. I probably did four minutes, five minutes. It&amp;#039;s weird \u2014 you go up there, it&amp;#039;s like, what&amp;#039;s the guy in Lord of the Rings who puts on the ring and he&amp;#039;s invisible? Then he lets it off and he&amp;#039;s sweating, like it&amp;#039;s so hard to be fucking invisible. It&amp;#039;s hard to hit homers. I try to hit homers. I&amp;#039;m not a singles hitter. I&amp;#039;m swinging like Sheffield every fucking time. As hard as I can. SR: I&amp;#039;m not bad-mouthing Tracy Morgan, but he was talking about the legacy of Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, and I&amp;#039;m thinking to myself, You&amp;#039;re not in that league. CR: Oh, I don&amp;#039;t think he thinks he&amp;#039;s in that league. Maybe he&amp;#039;s aspiring to be. SR: You&amp;#039;re more of the truth. You weren&amp;#039;t put on this earth to make people feel comfortable laughing. CR: No. I get it. I embrace it. Gladly. Somebody&amp;#039;s got to be that guy... Am I eating all this pizza? SR: God bless you. You&amp;#039;ve got a good appetite for a skinny young man. CR: In between projects. I eat now. The play [The Motherf**ker with the Hat] starts in April. So from February on, I&amp;#039;ll be in the gym. I&amp;#039;ll be watching my calories. SR: Ever done anything like that? CR: Never done a play. I did a thing called 24 Hour Plays, a thing they do every year on Broadway. A bunch of playwrights and actors get together, you write a play and you act it out in 24 hours, literally. People pay and the money goes to charity. So I did one \u2014 I was horrible.  SR: Horrible? CR: I was bad. I was terrified. And I was like, &amp;quot;Oh, I gotta do this again.&amp;quot; Because I know I can do it. When you do something bad and you know you can do it, only you know you can do it. And do it while it&amp;#039;s hot, man. Right now, while I&amp;#039;m this guy who can get this great play that Scott Rudin&amp;#039;s producing. If I wait too long, till I&amp;#039;m on the other side of show business, then I&amp;#039;m in Rap of Ages or I&amp;#039;ll be some guy in Grease. SR: What Ever Happened to Chris Rock? CR: Oof. SR: I don&amp;#039;t know which comes first, the sense of insecurity or the reality that this does happen, even to icons. CR: No one announces you can&amp;#039;t do something anymore. I remember I used to see Christian Slater movies all the time. One day they just stopped making &amp;#039;em. He didn&amp;#039;t get a memo. No one passes you a note. I remember having Jimmie Walker hats when I was a kid, lunch box, shirt, loose-leaf \u2014 you think he was warned? No. You think, Oh, I haven&amp;#039;t worked in six months, I&amp;#039;ll get a job next week. Oh, I haven&amp;#039;t worked in a year, now I got to really concentrate on it. It&amp;#039;s like finding out somebody cheated on you. Somebody tells you, you overhear it at the fucking coffee shop... SR: You have not fallen off that tightrope. CR: I don&amp;#039;t think so. Even if a movie&amp;#039;s not a hit, it still has to have something to do with the big thing, which is the stand-up. SR: That&amp;#039;s still the big thing? CR: It pays the most, first of all. It&amp;#039;s the thing that I can do at a high, high level. Amongst the best. You&amp;#039;ve got me and Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais and Louis C. K. and Larry the Cable Guy. Louis&amp;#039;s the best right now. He just played Carnegie Hall. Louis C. K. is one of the biggest comedians in the country. You know the weird thing about Louis? He&amp;#039;s an East Coast guy, been in New York the last 20, 30 years of his life, but the New York cultural elite doesn&amp;#039;t like him \u2014 too blue-collar, too Sternish for them. It&amp;#039;s very much like Howard Stern. And they only give it up to Stern now because of the money. SR: Louis&amp;#039;s way past anyplace Howard Stern&amp;#039;s ever been. CR: Howard Stern&amp;#039;s a bad motherfucker, man. Whenever I talk to Howard, I always point out \u2014 and I&amp;#039;ve been trying to point this out to my wife \u2014 I know some of it you don&amp;#039;t like, but if I had to be on six hours a day, it would be just as nasty and foul and not sophisticated. The fact that you&amp;#039;re going to see me do an hour every four years? Reduce Howard Stern to an hour every four years, you&amp;#039;d have the most brilliant comedian who ever lived. It&amp;#039;s not even close.  SR: Like many nice Caucasians, I cried the night Barack Obama was elected. It was one of the high points in American history. And all that&amp;#039;s happened since the election is just a shitstorm of hatred. You want to weigh in on that? CR: I actually like it, in the sense that \u2014 you got kids? Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism&amp;#039;s almost over. Because this is the last \u2014 this is the act up before the sleep. They&amp;#039;re going crazy. They&amp;#039;re insane. You want to get rid of them \u2014 and the next thing you know, they&amp;#039;re fucking knocked out. And that&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s going on in the country right now.  SR: I hope so. Because it seems like a lot of people feel they just can&amp;#039;t live with this man being president. CR: It&amp;#039;s a lot, man. I remember when I had my show [The Chris Rock Show on HBO], I used to run my show. It was so hard to get people to bring sketches to me. No one had ever worked for a black person before. Even the black people hadn&amp;#039;t worked for a black person. In show business, my God, there&amp;#039;s no black people in show business. I&amp;#039;ve never been to a black person&amp;#039;s office in show business, for a movie or anything. It literally took a month or two for everybody to know: I&amp;#039;m really running the show.  SR: Strange. CR: It&amp;#039;s strange, but it&amp;#039;s not. Women that were running things went through the exact same thing. I could&amp;#039;ve went crazy about it, but I actually felt sorry for them. SR: Jude Law \u2014 you killed his career when you hosted the Oscars. CR: I did not kill his career. Dude, I didn&amp;#039;t say Jude Law can&amp;#039;t act. I didn&amp;#039;t say Jude Law was in bad movies. I just said he&amp;#039;s in every movie. I hope one year in my life someone&amp;#039;s onstage talking about all the movies I&amp;#039;ve made. I hope I get to work with all the great directors he got to work with, too... I did bump into him one day. I was just walking by him and said, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s up?&amp;quot; and he kept walking. SR: He knew it was you? CR: I think ten minutes later he started realizing who I was. Anyway, I was sitting with Courtney Love, and she might&amp;#039;ve saved me from a fight. I&amp;#039;m not going to say ass-whipping, because I don&amp;#039;t think there&amp;#039;d be an ass-whipping. But you never know \u2014 he&amp;#039;s hanging out with Guy Ritchie. Those guys go at it. Those motherfuckers are in shape. So Jude Law might whip my ass, I don&amp;#039;t know. Those guys bring out mats and shit.  SR: What happened? CR: Nothing. Courtney kind of barked, or was growling, and that was it.  SR: And you pissed Sean Penn off. Which, by the way, could lead to an ass-whupping. CR: It could. SR: Theoretically. CR: Theoretically. It&amp;#039;s the Oscars, it&amp;#039;s sensitive. If I host the Oscars again, I wouldn&amp;#039;t do that. SR: Chris, I wouldn&amp;#039;t worry about that. CR: I&amp;#039;ve been inquired about. What they do with the Oscars is, they check the availabilities. They&amp;#039;re not into asking and being turned down. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;re you doing on February whatever? Will you be in L. A.?&amp;quot; So it&amp;#039;s been inquired about since then. It&amp;#039;s a weird skill. It&amp;#039;s not like you can get just anybody to do it... When I got the job, the first thing I asked was, &amp;quot;Are we doing a TV show or is this a banquet? Because if it&amp;#039;s a banquet, let&amp;#039;s not change anything. But if it&amp;#039;s a TV show, this motherfucker&amp;#039;s got to move.&amp;quot; My goal in life was to host the MTV Awards, because it&amp;#039;s the awards show that Prince sang on, and that was the awards show that Eddie Murphy hosted and Arsenio hosted. It&amp;#039;s hard to remember that the MTV Awards used to be huge. So the Oscars just wasn&amp;#039;t that thing to me. SR: Is Eddie Murphy a cautionary tale? CR: When he wants it, nobody&amp;#039;s funnier than him. No one&amp;#039;s even close to him. I just went through a little exercise where I watched a bunch of old movies, like from the &amp;#039;80s. The only ones that held up were the Murphy movies. A Murphy movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy \u2014 he&amp;#039;s that intensely good... He revolutionized acting. He&amp;#039;s literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking to you right now. Just like we&amp;#039;re talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him. Good Times is a good show for that: It was either John Amos or Jimmie Walker; that&amp;#039;s what black acting was.  SR: You ever doubt yourself up there trying to get laughs? CR: There&amp;#039;s doubt the whole time. One of the best compliments I ever got was Conan saying to me, &amp;quot;You know what I like about you? You&amp;#039;re smart enough to be scared. So many guys come on cocky, they don&amp;#039;t want to go over their stuff, they don&amp;#039;t want to do a pre-interview. You&amp;#039;re always smart enough to be worried till the last minute.&amp;quot; That will not stop. You get some guys who get all cocky and they fall right on their fucking face. SR: You learn to trust your stuff.  CR: I trust it, but you still have to \u2014 you can have your stuff, but your footwork&amp;#039;s still got to be right, you got to follow through, all these things. Even when you have your stuff, you cannot have your stuff because you&amp;#039;re not doing one thing.  SR: But nobody else is going to go out there and be you. CR: Somebody&amp;#039;ll be me, tomorrow or whenever. I&amp;#039;ve been doing this awhile. My time&amp;#039;s limited. I&amp;#039;ve been doing this awhile. SR: You haven&amp;#039;t lost anything off your fastball. CR: I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve lost anything off my fastball, but soon you&amp;#039;ll see somebody else&amp;#039;s fastball. There&amp;#039;s nothing like a new fastball.  SR: Who&amp;#039;s the next guy? CR: I like this Hannibal Buress kid. Black guy. The illegitimate son of Mitch Hedberg. Get his record \u2014 you&amp;#039;ll like it. If you like stand-up \u2014 see, a lot of people inherently don&amp;#039;t like stand-up, so when they judge a stand-up, they actually look at what he&amp;#039;s wearing. There&amp;#039;s been a lot of hair bands the last few years in the stand-up world. I will name no names, but I haven&amp;#039;t heard the words good-looking so much in my life. Who the fuck gives a fuck what a stand-up looks like? SR: To me, it&amp;#039;s a miracle that guys can just get up there. CR: And produce laughter. It&amp;#039;s kind of a magic trick. I still don&amp;#039;t understand it.  THE APPENDIX: A (Very) Related Q&amp;amp;amp;A with Comedian Hannibal Buress &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a9392/chris-rock-interview-0311/>