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THE VISIONARY COMEDY OF CHRIS ROCK

Chris Rock may have been wrong about AIDS—but only slightly. In his second blockbuster comedy special for HBO, "Bigger and Blacker" (1999), Rock emphatically suggested that:

They ain’t never curing AIDS. Don’t even think about that shit. There ain’t no money in the cure. The money’s in the medicine. That’s how you get paid. On the comeback. That’s how a drug dealer makes his money. On the comeback. That’s all the government is. A bunch of motherfucking drug dealers. On the comeback. They ain’t curing no AIDS.

It seems Rock may have been right to suspect that a cure would not come from the pharmaceutical industry. A new AIDS vaccine has recently shown promising experimental results, owing to the efforts of a California non-profit called Global Solutions for Infectious Disease.

Rock has had an impressive track record in speaking foul-mouthed truth to power. In an interview before Live Earth, a carbon-spewing concert extravaganza to raise awareness about climate change, Rock prayed that it would end "global warming the same way that Live Aid ended world poverty". During his "Never Scared" special in 2004, he detailed the downfall of the King of Pop and concluded, "Prince won". At a show in South Africa for his latest comedy special "Kill the Messenger" (2008), he foresaw John McCain’s ballot box defeat: "George Bush has fucked up so bad, he made it hard for a white man to run for president. People are like 'give me a black man, a white woman, a giraffe, a zebra...anything but another white man'!"

So perhaps American gun owners were right to stock up on kit over the summer. In "Bigger and Blacker", Rock called for rethinking arms regulations:

You don’t need no gun control. We need some bullet control. I think all bullets should cost $5,000. If a bullet cost $5,000, there’ll be no more innocent bystanders. Every time somebody gets shot it’ll be like, "Man, he must have done something. Shit, they put $50,000 worth of bullets in his ass".

With a Chris Rock-quoting president in the White House, the visionary comedian may be proven right again.

Chris Rock returns to cinemas this month with his first documentary, “Good Hair.”

~ CORBIN HIAR