Chris Rock carried a yellow legal pad onto the stage of the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Nobody had announced him. About fifty people watched one of the most famous comedians in America read jokes he had not finished writing.
Most of the jokes died. Through a set of roughly forty-five minutes, Rock lost his train of thought and looked down at the pad to find his place, while some people in the audience sat with their arms folded. When a bit fell flat, he paused and told the room, "This needs to be fleshed out more if it's gonna make it." Then he wrote on the pad and tried the next one.
He came back to the same club between forty and fifty times before a world tour. Peter Sims, who described the routine in his 2011 book Little Bets, wrote that Rock tried hundreds of rough ideas, possibly thousands, to find the handful that made the final cut. By the time Rock reached an HBO special or a Letterman appearance, the jokes, the opening, the transitions, and the closing had each been tested again and again. "It's like boxing training camp," Rock told the Orange County Register.
The Stress Factory handed him a stranger's verdict on every line within a second of delivering it, and the pad kept each verdict after the laughter or the silence had passed.
