Live From New York - James H. Miller [203]
My frustration was half that, and the other half like the black comedy boom was happening and I wasn’t part of it. In Living Color was a big show, and Def Comedy Jam was on HBO, and Martin Lawrence was on. So there was all this stuff happening, and I was over here in this weird world, this weird, Waspy world. But the things I learned there — there’d be no Chris Rock Show, I never would have had the success that I had with that, if I hadn’t been on SNL learning how to run a show. I didn’t go to college. So it was all school to me. Everyone was a professor — Professor Al Franken, Professor Phil Hartman.
NORM MACDONALD, Cast Member:
I always hear about how Chris Rock was underutilized and stuff. That’s not really true. I mean, they let you do whatever you want on that show. So you can’t blame anybody. It’s just that Chris is a great stand-up comedian, a great voice. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he’s a great sketch-comedy comedian.
CHRIS ROCK:
“Can’t compete with white people, man. You’ll lose your mind.” My mother told me that a long time ago. “Just find your spot. Find your spot, work within that spot.” Okay, everybody’s writing sketches for the host. They’ve got to do something without the host, let me write something without the host. I was a separate thing.
With Tim Meadows being on the show, you know somewhere in your mind that if there’s two nonwhite, pretty good sketches, they probably won’t both get on. And they’ll never go back-to-back, even if they have nothing to do with each other. One could be about medieval times and one could be a drag-racing thing, but you’re never going to see this sketch with a bunch of black people, and this other sketch with a bunch of black people, back-to-back. One might go near the top of the show and the other would be at the end of the show.
That’s how it was in comedy clubs too. One black comic goes on at nine o’clock, they will not be putting me on at nine-fifteen. Same goes with women. It was just men in power overreacting, overthinking things.
FRED WOLF:
The one thing I will say is that while Chris was on the show, I would walk somewhere with him and everyone was recognizing him. Everyone out there knew who he was, and typically he’d have more of a black slant to some of the stuff he was doing. And I think he felt like his audience wasn’t really watching Saturday Night Live, and that may be the case. But I also think he’s been able to cross over quite a bit, and I think some of the stuff he learned at Saturday Night Live or was able to sort of do at Saturday Night Live probably helped him prepare for that.
If he had started at In Living Color, maybe he would have jump-started much faster than he did at Saturday Night Live. My observation was, yeah, he was having a rough time. But I don’t think Saturday Night Live hurt him in any way.
CHRIS ROCK:
Maybe I could have worked harder. As I think back on it, I worked just as hard as anybody else, but as my father raised me, “You’ve got to work harder than the white man. You can’t work as hard; you’re not going to get anywhere.” I don’t want to say anything bad about the place. They’re good people.
It’s not the place for a black guy, it’s not the hippest place, man. We used to always get the black acts the year they were finished. Like the music acts. So we got Hammer when he did “Too Legit to Quit,” when he did The Addams Family theme song, on his way out. We get Whitney Houston on the way out. I’m just telling the truth, man.
Who wrote for me? Me, man. Just me. No black writers and no one really got into that side of the culture. Half the culture’s into some form of hip-hop sensibility, half of the white culture, it’s not just a black thing, but the show’s never really dealt with that part of