The story behind Chris Rock's "Bring the Pain"
Ep5 of Cultureshock (on Hulu) is a deep dive on Chris Rock's “Bring the Pain” and how it changed comedy. W. Kamau Bell directed and it’s really well done (and even features Oprah). Here’s a clip:
In the doc, Rock talks about what he learned from watching Martin Lawrence crush: “It’s not enough to just tell a joke, you have to sell a joke.”
It’s not enough to just tell a joke, you have to sell a joke. I learned about stage movement, [his] shoulders were always squared on the punchline. There’s definitely a school that you’re performing too much, you’re too sweaty. Audiences like sweat. Audience love sweat. James brown sweat. MC Hammer sweat. Bobby Brown sweat. Prince, you know, would wipe it off, but there would be some sweat there. The audience always appreciated that level of performance, especially in standup because there’s not a lot of performance in standup.
Here’s Bell discussing the project:
The thing I took from Bring the Pain is that he was really trying to figure out, What do I want to say and how do I want to say it? And also — which I think is how most great art works, from the inward instead of outward — this is kind of a standard thing in comedy, [but] there's sort of a stage in comedy where you're trying to do what the audience wants you to do and you're trying to shock the audience, where really Chris was trying to surprise himself. So ultimately, in trying to surprise himself and push himself, it ended up that he was surprising and pushing all of us. He didn't go up there on stage saying, "How can I shock these people or how can I offend these people?" He was like, "How can I say something that I haven't said before? How can I put this in a way that I feel like I'm not hearing it out in the world?" On top of that, I think it's also about being an honest self-critic of yourself, so when he was out there in the world and suddenly he was following Martin Lawrence [laughs] and he bombed, he didn't get mad at Martin Lawrence, he got mad at himself.
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