Part of From Stand-Up to A-List featuring Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and Kevin Hart.
Rise to Fame
SNL wasn't the breakthrough everyone assumes. He spent three years there getting minor parts, frustrated about being racially typecast, and left in 1993. After that, he hit the road hard, treating stand-up like a fighter training for a title shot. Bring the Pain in 1996 was the result: an HBO special that won two Emmys and earned him the "funniest man in America" label from both Time and Entertainment Weekly. The road work paid off.
In the Spotlight
The 2022 Oscars slap is the lens through which everything gets interpreted now. Rock declined to file a police report the same night. He waited a year before addressing it publicly, then did it live on Netflix. Selective Outrage drew 798 million viewing minutes in its first full week, breaking Nielsen streaming records. Critics were mixed; audiences were not. A Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, with Steven Spielberg as executive producer, is next, which suggests he's not interested in being remembered only for the slap.
Side Notes
Cleaning tables at The Comic Strip Live in exchange for late-night stage time was how he got started. Eddie Murphy walked in one night, saw his set, and handed him his first film role: a parking valet in Beverly Hills Cop II. The hustle came from necessity. Growing up in Bed-Stuy, he was bused to a mostly white school and took severe racial bullying, something he's returned to in interviews for decades. His father drove trucks and delivered newspapers. The comedy was never going to be comfortable.