Tamborine

Chris Rock took the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2017 for what became his first recorded stand-up special in a decade. Directed by Bo Burnham, Tamborine shifts away from the roaring, arena-sized sermonizing of Rock’s previous specials toward a tighter, more intimate visual style. Burnham uses warm, hazy stage lighting and subtle, tight camera tracking to focus attention directly on a comic who, for the first time in his career, spends a significant portion of his set looking backward with regret rather than aiming outward with fury.

The performance splits itself between pointed social commentary and blunt personal confession. Rock spends his opening twenty minutes tackling police brutality, arguing that “bad apples” are acceptable for some jobs but completely intolerable when you are flying a plane or policing a neighborhood. He turns that same skepticism toward parenting and the modern “you can be anything” ethos, suggesting that teenagers instead learn practical trades.

The core of the set, however, is Rock’s accounting of his own failures. He details his divorce, his addiction to online pornography, and his infidelity with three different women. The special gets its name from his central metaphor for relationships: a marriage is a band, and sometimes you have to accept that you are not the lead singer. Sometimes, he says, you just have to play the tamborine with a smile. Critics praised the vulnerability of this material, noting that it offered a side of Rock’s stage persona that had previously been obscured by his swagger.