Chris Rock continues his press run for Top Five with yet another piece of totally en fuego commentary, this time in the form of an essay for the Hollywood Reporter. In it, he’s just like, ripping down the curtain of political silence around Hollywood’s rampant racism, throwing said curtain on the ground and blasting it with a blowtorch before pissing on it. It’s awesome.
He begins the piece with anecdotes about helping younger black comedians around him, because he knows the infrastructure doesn’t exist in the same way it does for young white comedians. For example, he had a hand in getting Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live: “She’s about as funny as a human being can be,” he writes, “but she didn’t go to Second City, she doesn’t do stand-up at The Cellar and she’s not in with Judd Apatow, so how the hell was she ever going to get through unless somebody like me says to Lorne Michaels, ‘Hey, look at this person’?”