50 Fun Facts About Chris Rock

Chris Rock's 1999 hit No Sex (In the Champagne Room) parodies a spoken-word advice single by which film director?

Baz Luhrmann had a 1999 hit with a spoken list of life advice whose title urges listeners to wear sunscreen, and Rock answered with his own one-liners for graduates.

Which Grammy-winning 1999 Chris Rock album features the spoken-word track No Sex (In the Champagne Room)?

Bigger & Blacker mixed live stand-up from his HBO special with studio sketches featuring guests such as Ice Cube and Biz Markie.

After dropping out of high school, Chris Rock worked as a busboy at which American restaurant chain?

Red Lobster was one of several restaurant jobs Rock held after leaving school at 17, and his first album includes a routine about busboys and minimum wage.

Which comedy superstar spotted Chris Rock's nightclub act, mentored him and gave him a first credited film role in 1987?

Eddie Murphy put the unknown Rock on screen as a parking valet in Beverly Hills Cop II after seeing him perform in a New York club.

In the Madagascar films, Chris Rock voices Marty, a Central Park Zoo resident who is which kind of animal?

Zebra Marty sets the whole story in motion by slipping out of the zoo on his tenth birthday to see the wild, and Rock voiced him in three films.

Which famous actress guest-starred in Everybody Hates Chris as the overbearing grandmother of Tasha, the girl next door?

Whoopi Goldberg played nosy neighbor Louise Clarkson on a sitcom whose title spoofs Everybody Loves Raymond, and she later appeared as herself in Rock's film Top Five.

Which actor walked on stage and slapped presenter Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards, then won Best Actor?

Will Smith was later banned from Academy events for ten years, while Rock declined to file a police report and carried on presenting the award.

Chris Rock is famously a product of Brooklyn, but in which Southern state was the comedian actually born?

South Carolina is where Rock was born, in the small town of Andrews, before his family moved north to Brooklyn while he was still a baby.

Which 1996 HBO stand-up special turned Chris Rock into a superstar and won him two Emmy Awards?

Bring the Pain followed two years of nightly club sets spent rebuilding his act, and Variety compared the result to Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce.

Chris Rock voiced Lil Penny, a puppet alter ego of an NBA star, in 1990s commercials for which sportswear brand?

Nike built the mid-1990s campaign around a puppet version of Orlando Magic guard Penny Hardaway, and Rock supplied its voice.

Which actor played Julius, the hard-working, penny-pinching father, in the Chris Rock sitcom Everybody Hates Chris?

Terry Crews played a frugal dad holding down two jobs, a character who shares the first name of Rock's real father, a newspaper delivery driver.

Which actor played the teenage version of Chris Rock in all four seasons of the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris?

Tyler James Williams won an NAACP Image Award for the part, playing a skinny, nerdy kid sent to a mostly white school two bus rides from home.

Chris Rock grew up from the age of six in which Brooklyn neighborhood, later the setting of his sitcom?

Bed-Stuy, short for Bedford–Stuyvesant, became home when his family settled in a yellow brick house there after a few years in Crown Heights.

Chris Rock joined which action film franchise in 1998 as Detective Lee Butters, a cop hiding a family secret?

Lethal Weapon 4 made Rock's character the father of Roger Murtaugh's unborn grandchild, a secret that finally slips out under laughing gas.

Chris Rock starred in and executive-produced Spiral, a 2021 spin-off of which long-running horror film series?

Saw got its ninth film in Spiral, which came about because Rock wanted to branch out into horror; he plays a detective on the trail of a Jigsaw copycat.

Chris Rock played 1950s crime boss Loy Cannon in the fourth season of which FX crime series?

Fargo sent Rock to Kansas City as the head of a Black crime syndicate at war with the Italian mob, with a sideline pitching an early credit card.

Chris Rock's joke that got him slapped at the 2022 Oscars referenced which film starring Demi Moore?

G.I. Jane features Moore with a shaved head, and the unscripted joke was aimed at a guest who had shaved hers because of alopecia.

In the 1991 crime film New Jack City, Chris Rock won acclaim as which crack addict turned police informant?

Pookie goes through rehab and then walks back into the drug gang's headquarters wearing a hidden camera, the dramatic part that got Rock noticed as an actor.

Which R&B star sings the chorus behind Chris Rock on the spoken-word single No Sex (In the Champagne Room)?

Gerald Levert ended up on the record largely by chance: Rock later said the singer just happened to be working in the studio upstairs.

Which screen veteran played Chris Rock's fellow hitman, later revealed as his father, in the dark comedy Nurse Betty?

Morgan Freeman and Rock chase Renée Zellweger's newly widowed Betty from Kansas to Los Angeles in a film that won the screenplay prize at Cannes.

Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and David Spade were a young Saturday Night Live clique given which nickname?

The Bad Boys of SNL also counted Rob Schneider among them, and Rock stayed in the cast from 1990 to 1993 before coming back to host in 1996.

After leaving Saturday Night Live in 1993, Chris Rock made six guest appearances on which rival comedy show?

In Living Color used Rock in six episodes of its final season, mostly as Cheap Pete, a character he first played in the film I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

In the 1999 religious satire Dogma, Chris Rock plays Rufus, who is which kind of biblical figure?

Apostle number thirteen helps the last surviving relative of Jesus on a road trip, in a satire whose release drew organized protests and death threats against its director.

Chris Rock's 2001 comedy Down to Earth, about a comedian reborn in a rich man's body, remade which Warren Beatty film?

Heaven Can Wait was a 1978 hit about a football player taken before his time, and Rock's version made the hero a struggling stand-up placed in a drowned tycoon's body.

Chris Rock voices Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell cop, inside the body of a zookeeper played by which comedy star?

Bill Murray plays the junk-food-loving Frank in live-action scenes directed by the Farrelly brothers, while Rock's animated cell teams up with a cold pill to stop a deadly virus.

In the 2007 animated comedy Bee Movie, Chris Rock voices a character who is which kind of insect?

Mosquito Mooseblood gave Rock another DreamWorks voice role after Madagascar, this time in a comedy built around Jerry Seinfeld as a bee.

Which actress played Rochelle, the fiery mother who rules the household, in Chris Rock's sitcom Everybody Hates Chris?

Tichina Arnold won an NAACP Image Award as Rochelle, who keeps a firm grip on the family and goes to work at a beauty salon in the final season.

At the 2005 Oscars, Sean Penn used his time on stage to defend which actor from host Chris Rock's jokes?

Jude Law had been in so many films that year that Rock asked who he was, and the actor was still angry about the routine more than a year later.

Chris Rock recorded his third HBO stand-up special, in 1999, on the stage of which famous New York venue?

Apollo Theater audiences in Harlem saw the 1999 taping, and Rock went back there in 2008 to film part of Kill the Messenger.

Chris Rock named his Emmy-winning 1996 HBO special after a 1994 single by which Wu-Tang Clan rapper?

Method Man released the track as the first single from his debut album Tical, and he is credited at the end of Rock's special.

Chris Rock wrote and starred in which 1993 mockumentary about a fake gangsta rap group, a spoof of N.W.A?

CB4 borrowed from This Is Spinal Tap to send up gangsta rap, and the low-budget film took in about three times what it cost to make.

Which comedian and filmmaker directed Chris Rock's 2018 Netflix special Tamborine, his first special in ten years?

Bo Burnham filmed the hour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in 2021 Rock put out his own longer re-edit, made without the director's involvement.

Which 2023 Chris Rock stand-up special was the first event that Netflix ever streamed live?

Selective Outrage went out live from a theatre in Baltimore, and in it Rock gave his long-awaited response to being slapped at the Oscars a year earlier.

Which comedian wrote and directed the 2001 comedy Pootie Tang, which Chris Rock produced and appeared in?

Louis C.K. adapted the film from a sketch that first aired on Rock's HBO talk show, and the two also co-wrote Down to Earth the same year.

Which comedian played the elder brother and running mate of Chris Rock's presidential candidate in Head of State?

Bernie Mac ends the 2003 comedy as vice president, in a film that was also Rock's first job as a director.

In the 2005 prison football comedy The Longest Yard, Chris Rock plays a well-connected inmate known by which nickname?

Caretaker is the fixer who helps Adam Sandler's quarterback recruit a team of inmates, and he even gets them proper uniforms through a cousin at Reebok.

Brooklyn-raised Chris Rock has been an avid fan of which Major League Baseball team since childhood?

New York Mets loyalty has not always been fun for Rock, who complained to David Letterman in 2011 that his team had no money.

Chris Rock makes a cameo appearance in the star-studded music video for which Lil Nas X hit?

Old Town Road opens in the Wild West of 1889 with Rock among the riders chasing Lil Nas X, in a Calmatic-directed video that also features Diplo, Vince Staples and Rico Nasty.

Which actor appears in both the 2007 British comedy Death at a Funeral and Chris Rock's 2010 American remake?

Peter Dinklage turns up at the funeral in both versions as a stranger with a secret about the dead man, the only cast member to make the trip across the Atlantic.

Which actress played Deanne, the wife of Chris Rock's stay-at-home dad Kurt, in the 2010 comedy Grown Ups?

Maya Rudolph plays a wife expecting the couple's third child while her mother lives with them, and the cast reunited for a sequel in 2013.

Which actress plays the New York Times reporter who spends a day interviewing Chris Rock's comedian in Top Five?

Rosario Dawson's journalist trails a star trying to leave his hit Hammy the Bear comedies behind, in a 2014 film that Rock also wrote and directed.

Which 2009 Chris Rock documentary, sparked by a question from his daughter Lola, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance?

Good Hair takes Rock through salons, laboratories and styling conventions inside a multibillion-dollar Black hair-care business, and the National Board of Review named it one of the year's top documentaries.

Everybody Hates Chris premiered in 2005 on which American network before moving to The CW for three more seasons?

UPN took the sitcom after Fox, which had developed it, passed on the project, so Rock's show spent only its first season there.

Which director, later behind Drake's Hotline Bling video, shot the clip for Chris Rock's No Sex (In the Champagne Room)?

Little X, who now works as Director X, made a clip that had its world premiere on MTV's Total Request Live in July 1999.

Chris Rock's 2008 special Kill the Messenger was edited together from shows in New York, London and which African city?

Johannesburg's Carnival City Casino was one of three stages stitched into a single hour, which won Rock another Emmy for his writing.

In the 2023 civil rights drama Rustin, Chris Rock plays which real-life leader of the NAACP?

Roy Wilkins keeps objecting in the film to Bayard Rustin's part in organizing the 1963 March on Washington because of his reputation.

Which French star co-wrote, directed and acted opposite Chris Rock in the 2012 romantic comedy 2 Days in New York?

Julie Delpy cast Rock as Mingus, the boyfriend whose cozy home is overrun by her character's visiting French family, in a sequel to her film 2 Days in Paris.

A DNA test on the PBS series African American Lives 2 traced Chris Rock's ancestry to which African country?

Cameroon was the answer, and the same programme revealed that his great-great-grandfather fought for the Union in the Civil War and later served two terms as a state legislator.

Which MADtv cast member played Chris Rock in the sketch show's parody of No Sex (In the Champagne Room)?

Phil LaMarr later inherited another Rock part, voicing the title cell in the animated television spin-off of Osmosis Jones.

Chris Rock began performing stand-up comedy in 1984 at which New York City comedy club?

Catch a Rising Star was where Rock first got on stage, a few years before a nightclub set won him a famous mentor and a part in a hit sequel.