Tag Archives: Barrack Obama

Chris Rock stalked onto the stage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater late on a Friday night earlier this month and opened his fifth HBO comedy special by explaining why it had been so long since the fourth. He wanted to wait, he told the audience, until the moment was just right. Rock has become the country’s smartest, most essential comic by salting his punch lines with blunt social evangelism. And in a prior special, 1999′s “Bigger and Blacker,” he went on a riff about how the black community desperately needed a new generation of leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King in his day—a not-uncontroversial stance, given that many of the old leaders were still very much alive. Now here was Rock, less than two months from a historic election, in the cathedral of African-American culture, arriving like a prophet to testify about Barack Obama. Everyone leaned forward: this is what we came for. To laugh, sure, but mostly to hear Rock on Barack. (HBO will air the special, “Kill the Messenger,” on Sept. 27.) Continue reading →