Rock Star

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Start with the pain. 'Cause we all know pain is what makes things funny. So start with the hurt, back when comic-actor-author-ad pitchman Chris Rock was li'l Chris from Bed-Stuy, just another black kid from a poor black neighborhood bused to another poor section of New York City because the school there was mostly white. Go back to the white kids spitting on him, week after week, calling him n______ this, n______ that, picking fights. And poor white kids, he says, are tough. They're not like your suburbanized white kids; they got all this frustration and anger 'cause they're white, for crying out loud, and they're living in America, and they're living as bad as Negroes, for God's sake; so there's no way they're gonna let a scrawny, bused-in black kid from Bed-Stuy have a moment's worth of happiness. "Can you believe Andrew Dice Clay once went to my school?" Rock says, remembering. "He was way older, but that was the kind of student the place produced." He sighs. "That was my roughest time."

There's the pain. Years later, when Rock was 25 years old and on the stand-up circuit, he turned the experience into a punch line. "Ain't nothing more horrifying than a bunch of poor white people," Rock joked in his act. "They blame n_______ for everything... 'Space shuttle blew up! Them damn n______, that's what it was!'"

Chris Rock isn't just getting the last laugh, he's getting the biggest laugh, the gettin'-paid laugh. Maybe he had to get whupped upside the head by some sixth-grader to get here, maybe he had to play a bellhop in Beverly Hills Ninja, but he has arrived and is on Hollywood's hot list.

The 32-year-old comic-actor is currently co-starring in Lethal Weapon 4, the latest installment of the cop-action franchise. He nearly steals the show as the voice of a guinea pig in Eddie Murphy's hit comedy Dr. Dolittle. Rock is co-starring in a comedy-fantasy due out early next year called Dogma, which also stars buzzed-about actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and is directed by hot indie filmmaker Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy). On Aug. 21, Rock begins a new season of his critically lauded, superhip HBO talk show, The Chris Rock Show. And Rock recently finalized a deal with HBO to develop new specials and series for the cable channel. "HBO has been known for breaking top comedians, and Chris is the most important to come along in a long time," says Chris Albrecht, president of original programming for HBO. "He's a guy who can get away with being honest in a way that few people can."

Only in show biz would you have to get away with being honest. Rock's been getting away with it for years. He started at age 18 at the New York City comedy club Comic Strip Live. Owner Richard Tienken says Rock's act was raw at first: hooker tells man she'll do anything for $300. Man answers, Paint my house, b_____! But then, hanging around the club, Rock began to see comics like Eddie Murphy (an early Rock booster) and George Carlin at work. Rock's own act got smarter, bolder, and in 1990 he landed a job on Saturday Night Live. "At the time that Chris was coming up, the Def Comedy Jam style became the dominant African-American style of comedy," says SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels. "The shock there was in the language. But Chris was going with the shock of ideas."