Customer Reviews

Saturday Night Live - The Best of Chris Rock

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Here are the sketches that are included in this DVD:
Monologue (When Chris hosted SNL)
2 Live Crew Party
Hangin' With MTV: Big Toe Song
Weekend Update: Taxes & Crime
"I'm Chillin'"
Russel Simmons Def Magic Show Jam
The Bensonhurst Dating Game
Def Emergency Room Jam
Weekend Update: Black Vice President
The Dark Side with Nat X - guests: Jesse Jackson & Mike Tyson
Nike Turkey (Pump It Song)
Sinatra Group
Weekend Update: Back To School/Charlie Brown
Proud Pattersons
The Survive The Apollo Guide for White Men
Weekend Update: MLK Holiday In Arizona
Perspectives
Not Getting Any
Ernies Store
Credits / Monologue from SNL 25th Anniversary

Extras
The Dark Side with Nat X - guests: Jimmy Smith / Jerry Coony(?)
Weekend Update: Racial Sterotypes/Names for White People
Sketch/Production Credits

The best sketches by far on here are the Weekend Update's and the Nat X's. The sketches in which Rock plays 'second/third' bannana are 2 Live Crew, Sinatra, Not Getting Any, and Bensonhurst. 2 Live Crew and Not Getting Any aren't even funny. And Ernies is a pretty bad sketch.

The rest on this DVD are pure gold. The Extras are great too. SNL should just include more.

This collection is an insult to Chris Rock. SNL has succeeded in even making the greatest comedian of our time look bad. Rent this first to see how bad it is before you waste your money as well as your time. Get his concert and HBO shows. This is what happens when you put a comedian from the wild in a SNL cage.... he dies. Thank God he was able to be reborn on HBO. It's just not funny. Sorry.

Chris's Best of Saturday Night Live just shines in this collection. His ability to make serious issues downright hilarious is obvious throughout the tape. The executives at Saturday Night Live did not appreciate his talent as much as they should have. I collect Saturday Night Live videos and this is the latest addition to the group and my personal favorite. Some of the material is the same jokes that are in "Bring the Pain" but I don't think you can ever hear them too much. Rock's parodies of early 90's rap and R&B are incredibly funny and his news commentaries on the racial gap are shocking but you can't help but laugh. This video is a definite must for any Chris Rock or Saturday Night Live fan.

Saturday Night Live is a GOLD MINE of comic material. What a great American institution. There must be hundreds of hours of classic comedy footage of great comedians on the show.
Why then do the selectors of these 'Best Of' DVDs seem so sloppy and careless when it comes to choosing sketches? This DVD is a good example. Most of the material here is very average, even though much funnier Chris Rock SNL material was recorded. Apparently Chris Rock starred in more sketches that were a lot funnier than these, but they don't appear on the DVD. Instead we get a badly chosen selection that doesn't present Rock's best work on the show.
The best bits of the DVD are the parts that closely resemble Rock's best medium - Stand Up. There are his introductions from when he hosted the show where he uses material from his Bigger & Blacker tour - but because this was on SNL the material is watered down and lacks the PUNCH of his proper live shows.
Rock is at his best doing very honest, raw stand-up, so unless you are a die hard fan of his SNL contributions and you don't mind dissapointment, I'd give this a miss.
Go for his stand-up comedy DVDs instead.

Even though he was a cast member on "Saturday Night Live" for only three years, Chris Rock gave the show enough great moments to give him a comprehensive collection of his best material. Wrong.

Like "The Best Of Tracy Morgan", this dvd basically focuses on Rock's most famous characters (he only had 5). And like that other best - off, the producers opt for any random sketch featuring these charcters, which means that the Nat X and "I'm Chillin'" sketches are not the funniest ones he ever did. In fact, both of them are from when he hosted, which means they are nowhere near as good as when he was a castmember. (They also don't icnlude the two very funny charcters Chris Farley played in these bits). The funniest sketches on the dvd, "The Bensonhurst Dating Game" and "The Sinatra Group" are hilarious but don't feature Rock in a starring role. In the first one, Rock plays the straight man while being the butt of racial jokes made by Joe Pesci, Adam Sandler and Dana Carvey. And in "The Sinatra Group", Phil Hartman is the star while Rock sits silent except for a few seconds. The only true standout sketches are the "Update" commentaries. They are hilarious.

What makes this dvd all the more disappointing is that a lot of stuff is missing from the dvd. Where is his Michael Jackson and Arsenio Hall impressions? Where's Buster Jenkins? The bonus bits are much funnier than a lot of the sketches on the dvd, especially the Nat X bit.

A very disappointing look back at Rock's work. Hopefully he will get a much better volume two of his best work.

As one of "Saturday Night Live's"most famous comedians, Chris Rock created a long line of classic characters and impressions in his 3 years on the show. But many of them are missing. A few recurring sketches are here, but they are from when he hosted the show.

A lot of this dvd's best sketches have Rock as a second and even third banana. For instnace, in the "Sinatra Group" sketch (this one's my favorite), his role as 2 Live Crew star is sadly limited, as Phil Hartman shines as Frank Sinatra (though to be fair, Sinatra is supposed to be the main focus). The other Luther Campbell sketch is funny, with Phil Hartman, Mike Myers and Jan Hooks, Dana Carvey and that "Twi Peaks" guy throwing song ideas at him left and right, much to his dismay. Another thing is that even when Rock is the main focus, another character outshines him. For instance, in "The Bensonhurts Dating Game", Rock's the main focus, but Joe Pesci gets the best lines. A sad waste of talent.

The extras are better. There's another one of his hiarious "Weekend Update" commentaries, plus a better "Nat X" sketch that is from 1990, back when the show was in its prime. This is proabably the least enjoyable "SNL" dvd ever. Chris Rock is another player who deserves a volume 2.

Chris Rock was one of the freshest, rawest comedians in "Saturday Night Live" history. Skits like "The Dark Side With Nat X", "2 Live Crew", "The Proud Pattersons" and his monologues showcase his unique flair for "urban humor". This dvd tries its best to include Rock's best moments, but unfortuneately, it caught in the muck and myer along the way.

There are about one or two things wrong with this dvd that do not make it live up to the superior retrospectives put together for Dana Carvey, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, and Adam Sandler. First up, skits like "I'm Chillin'" and "Big Toe Song" are rather pointless (the latter disgusting) and forgettable. Second, some of the best skits feature Rock as a second banana rather than the main focus. These happen to include my two favorite sketches, "The Bensonhurst Dating Game" and "The Sinatra Group". In the former, he is bested by host Joe Pesci and fellow "SNL" heavyweights Adam Sandler and Dana Carvey. In the latter, he plays Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew in a debate group led by Frank Sinatra, played by the superb Phil Hartman.

Overall, not too bad a dvd, but it could've been so much more.

Woohoo! This is too funny! I have allways loved SNL, but this is in the tie of the third funniest SNL videos(and there's a bunch of SNL videos!). There are many memorable lines like "You bickering, name calling caller item putting awayer." or "Bite me, bite me hard. Lick my blood."(that wasn't said by Chris but it's funny. OR one of the funniest of the Chris Rock sayings "You don't think there's a @#$&$! rabbit in this hat?! See there is a @#$&$! rabbit in this hat!". Also "My turkey needs no salt!" and the hilarious stand up from the comedian himself! The only reason I gave it 4 stars is because sometimes it gets too gross when it doesn't have to be.

This is a pretty funny DVD full of some of Chris Rock's best skits on SNL. But, beware, some of the recurring skits aren't featured at their best on this disc. The Nat X skit was the one from when he hosted the show, and definitely not as good as the ones when he was a cast member.

"Saturday Night Live" from 1975-83 traditionally always had at least one non-Caucasian cast member to give the predominantly white show a touch of urban, street related humor. In the '70s it was Garret Morris, in the early '80s Eddie Murphy, but as the age of political correctness set in during the late '80s, the show experienced a dry period for such material, though the show itself continued to be successful.

All that seemed to change when in April 1990 Fox debuted its successful sketch comedy show which featured a mostly African-American cast, "In Living Color." "SNL" now had a new, hip urban offspring to compete with elsewhere on the dial.

As its 16th season opened on September 29, 1990, "SNL" responded by introducing its first black cast member in several years, then 25-year-old comedian Chris Rock. I was 15 at the time and remember seeing the show that night, when he made his memorable debut toward the end in a funny sketch (included on this DVD) featuring Rock as 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell. For the next three seasons Rock would continue to occasionally turn up in sketches and in appearances on "Weekend Update" and inject the show with his own unique brand of humor, and most of the best material that featured him is compiled on this DVD.

The opening monologue featuring Rock and several of the skits here though actually come from when he came back to host the show after three years of being gone, during his memorable appearance of hosting on November 2, 1996. And all of it is extremely funny. You get perhaps the most popular recurring sketch he created during his years on the show, "the Dark Side with Nat X," a "15 minute show" patterned after David Letterman (because "the Man" would never let him have a full 30 minutes).

It should be noted that while Rock is the centerpiece here, other cast members shine in these skits as well. African-American female cast member Ellen Cleghorne (one of the few the show has ever had) is in particular hilarious in the Proud Pattersons/"Overacting Negro Ensemble" skit from 1992. And Rock's fellow black cast mate Tim Meadows generates much laughter in the only black public service show to air at 4:43 a.m. Sunday morning, "Perspectives."

I am too young to remember seeing Eddie Murphy on "SNL" back in his heyday (though I have seen the VHS compilation of his "SNL" material), so in the early '90s Chris Rock was it for race-related humor on the show. Seeing these sketches after all these years brings me back to my teens and shows just how talented Rock and his cast mates were. Hilarious, and a real blast from the past.