Bigger & Blacker

Chris Rock solves gun violence with economics. By pricing bullets at five thousand dollars a piece, he argues, shooters would be forced to budget for their grudges and innocent bystanders would survive. It is the kind of aggressive, left-field logic that defined his late-nineties run, delivered at a near-shout while pacing the stage in black leather. He takes heavy societal problems and strips them down to an absurd but unarguable core.\n\nFilmed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1999, the set arrived when Rock was highly visible. He was three years removed from Bring the Pain, hosting his own HBO talk show, and picking up roles in studio movies. While a few contemporary critics felt the hour lacked the absolute novelty of his previous outing, the material still caught on. The set leans heavily into specific childhood memories, notably a frantic sequence about Robitussin serving as a cheap medical treatment for everything from asthma to broken bones. He also spends time on the dynamics of aging out of the club, men settling down out of sheer exhaustion, and the domestic politics surrounding the big piece of chicken. It is a high-volume, tightly structured performance from a comic who knows exactly how to work a large room.