Chris Rock’s Live Experiment in Saving Face

That cadence. That cadence. You know what I mean, but it’s not sufficiently replicable in writing—and that is rather the point. Delivery is important in any form of storytelling, and in observational comedy cadence is the especial engine of wit. Chris Rockian prosody features heavy-footed consonance—a spittle-ful “P” in “poor” or “F” in “fucking”—and unusual syllabic emphases. Such rhythms imprint in memory his most famous lines: “I ain’t scared of Al Qaeda, I’m scared of Al Crack-a.”