I Love You, Chris
When someone like me hears about a show titled something like Everybody Hates Chris, it’s pretty much a given that someone like me is going to watch. Because we Chrises must stick together: Chris is a fairly puffy, soft, vague name and we need the support. Seriously. Kings aren’t named Christopher. Presidents aren’t named Christopher. Who’s named Christopher? Nobody. Kings, presidents, inventors, heroes, they’re all named John and Michael and William and George. Even Ronald has a better rep than Christopher.
So I’ll be voting for Christopher Walken for president, I think Christopher Lee deserves some kind of Oscar — most enormous comeback, maybe — Christopher Reeve should be sainted. Christopher Guest is the most amusing member of British royalty and I hope Topher Grace runs his own network someday.
And Chris Rock, well, he’s at the peak of his powers and we’re lucky to be here to see it. I’m too young for Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby’s gotten awfully cranky; Eddie Murphy’s sort of wandered off into Mediocre Movieland. But Chris Rock is on top now, and we should get as much of him as we can before he starts slipping — if he ever does.
Everybody Hates Chris is not part of the downward slide, I can tell you that. When I heard the title I thought I had to watch, but then when I read the synopsis, I began to have doubts. It’s on UPN? It’s about black people? It’s Chris Rock’s semiautobiography? Is this really going to mean anything to me aside from my sharing a first name with the titular character? I can’t relate to black humor. I was at a lunch counter the other day and the largely black and Latino staff and clientele had BET on and I found myself surprised that blacks would watch something called Black Entertainment Television. I mean, I wouldn’t watch White Entertainment Television — isn’t there something demeaning about a network like that? Either they’re saying that all blacks like the same TV, which is kind of rude; or they’re saying that every other TV network is playing non-black TV, which hardly seems like a fair assessment. It’s exclusive, not inclusive, and I guess I find the idea personally somewhat offensive.
I was wrong about Everybody Hates Chris, though. It turns out Chris Rock and I do have a lot in common and I can relate to his show, even if I am Super Whitey and he’s the very soul of blackness. Because while the show, to go by the pilot, is very much about growing up black, it seems that growing up is pretty much the same wherever and however you do it.
In this case, it’s 1982 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Chris and his family have just moved to a new neighborhood which should be better than the projects they were living in, but as Rock narrates, “If we’d known Bed-Stuy would be the center of the crack epidemic, maybe we would’ve picked someplace else.” Chris is thirteen years old, the oldest child of three. To get to his junior high school he takes two city buses, one with black people and then one with white people who won’t sit next to him, just so he can go to a mostly white school. There some kids beat him up and other kids befriend him. The new principal (veteran character actor Dannon Green) seems to be on his side against the bullies, but then again, he may not be. The white bus driver — played by war horse John Capodice in a great walk-on — certainly isn’t; when he sees Chris being chased by bullies he tries to pull away before Chris can get on board. Chris gets his arm in the closing door. “Bet you won’t catch me tomorrow,” says the driver, and Chris snaps back, “Bet I will.”
You can tell immediately Chris Rock and his co-creator Ali LeRoi aren’t writing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or The Cosby Show. They’re not pulling punches: At minute 12 the school bully calls Chris a nigger. This is not the Brooklyn of Welcome Back, Kotter where all the social misfits get along regardless of race, creed, or color.
And you just know the suits at a bigger network than UPN would say that such realism would alienate viewers. “The audience wants comedy,” they’d say, “Not to be offended by crude stereotyping. Cut the ‘nigger’ dialogue.” How UPN even let this slide — when most of its line-up seems to consist of modernized Stepin Fetchit routines — I’m not sure, but clearly the executives there are either a lot smarter than they’ve seemed until now or they’re not paying attention at all.
Which is good for us either way, because it’s exactly this realism and intensity that makes the show more inclusive, not less. Everybody Hates Chris is real life with the humor and the pain that comes with it. I can attest, having grown up at nearly the exact same time in nearly the exact same place, that kids used the word nigger, and not like Samuel L. Jackson, either. In my junior high, it was a black kid who terrorized kids in the hallways; in Chris’ school, it’s an endomorphic Italian kid. The thing I feared was when the bully would come up to me in the hall and throw his own books on the floor in front of me. “Pick ‘em up,” he’d say, while his group of friends would all glower at me menacingly. And you had to, because in a fight, the teachers — being good liberal products of New York City in the 1970s — always took the side of the black kids. After all, whites oppress blacks, not the other way around. Never mind that in my school, whites were the minority.
I had my glasses thrown across the cafeteria; I had basketballs bounced off the back of my head outside gym. Chris has his bus pass and lunch money stolen; he gets his school shoes wrecked. I won’t even discuss the time I came home minus one entire shoe. I don’t happen to think I suffered from racism — I was just a short, fat nerd, and I’m pretty sure I would’ve been picked on even in South Africa — but a lot of the time, things did seem to break down along racial lines.
Everybody Hates Chris calls up a particular time and place and makes it real, and that’s much more worthwhile than any generic sitcom on generic sets, whether the actors are light-skinned or dark. This show is more human than anything else on UPN, or the WB or BET for that matter, and is far better for everyone, black or white, than any hundred shows on any network. I clearly remember one English teacher I had in junior high who, while we were reading aloud from Huckleberry Finn, had to stop us to intone that every time she heard us read the the word “nigger” she felt a shiver of revulsion. But the fact is, by using the word in a true way, Mark Twain argues against racism better than any self-serving white liberal guilt spasm ever could. Rock and LeRoi own their show’s world enough that they can use that kind of reality in the same way Twain could.
And like Twain’s book, Everybody Hates Chris is not about a message. It’s about people making a life. Chris’ parents argue over who should pay the household bills and Mrs. Rock says you can’t pay all the bills on time because that won’t leave enough money to buy food. You have to manage your deficit spending “like the government.” My wife and I have the same argument once every few years. Mr. Rock works three or four jobs and sleeps during the day; the kids have to watch TV with the sound off so they don’t wake him up. When one of them flushes the toilet, Chris has to run in and cover the commode with pillows and blankets to muffle the sound. I think I actually lived in that apartment. If Rock’s TV family starts cursing in Italian I’m going to start sending him “To My Brother on His Birthday” cards.
So we do have more in common than just our first name, Chris Rock and I. It just may not seem like it at first glance. And I’m glad his show told me so, because otherwise I might not have believed it, not really. It’s good enough when TV is entertaining, but it’s so much better when you learn something, too.