Rock hits bottom with lack of comedic material

Originally published in The Daily Orange - 10/28/05

The great appeal of Chris Rock is that he's an equal opportunity offender. He'll crack jokes about anyone, regardless of race, gender or class. "Everybody Hates Chris," airing Thursday nights at 8 on UPN, tries to contain Rock's edgy humor in a half-hour family-oriented comedy.
Unfortunately, the jokes that work in his stand-up routine fall flat when they are scrubbed clean for primetime.
The show is set in 1982, when Chris (Tyler James Williams) and his family move from a housing project to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The social awkwardness facing any 13-year-old boy is compounded when his mom Rochelle (Tichina Arnold) enrolls him in the all-white Corleone Junior High. With his strict parents working hard to provide a better life for the family, Chris often finds himself stuck with more responsibility than he wants as he tries to control his younger, but taller, brother and his bratty little sister.
Rock provides voice-over narration to establish the setup for each episode. Since the show is done without a laugh track, the audience is cued when to laugh by the infliction in Rock's voice. A lot of the one-liners he provides as commentary would probably cause eruptions of laughter in a comedy special. In this context, they cause a smile at best.
When speaking about the street he lives on, Rock explains despite the presence of "hundreds of kids" on the block, there were only four fathers. Rock continues to tell the audience that "between these four dads, they had 16 jobs and worked 492 hours a week." In his stand-up, Rock would be making social commentary on dead-beat fathers. On "Everybody Hates Chris," it just seems stereotypical in the worst way.
Chris is always worried about upsetting his parents, and is scared to tell them his bike has been stolen. He imagines how his mother would punish him if she knew. "I smacked him into next week," she tells his younger siblings. "He'll be back on Tuesday." Sadly, this was the funniest line in the episode.
"Everybody Hates Chris," is nothing more than a typical family sitcom. There are running jokes in each episode about family members. Julius (Terry Crews), Chris' dad, is so cheap he knows the exact amount of food wasted. As he cleans up the breakfast plates, he picks up some scraps and says, "That's five cents' worth of bread," before popping it in his mouth. Rochelle is always quitting her temp jobs, telling her employer how many jobs her husband works, before she storms out. The show successfully conveys the love this family has for each other, but so does "Two and a Half Men."
"Everybody Hates Chris" lacks Rock's street-smart and honest humor. Cleaning up his obscenity-laced routine for television shouldn't have removed his social message.