Chris Rock Workshopped a Lot of His Divorce Jokes in a ‘Saw’ Sequel
Stand-up comedians don’t typically get cast in iconic horror franchises, hence why Rodney Dangerfield never faced off against Freddy Krueger, and Joan Rivers never ridiculed Michael Myers’ uninspired coverall ensemble.
But in 2019, the world was blindsided by the news that Chris Rock would be executive producing and starring in a new Saw movie, presumably in which a Jigsaw-like psycho tortures people using only a DVD copy of Grown Ups 2.
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In 2021, we got Spiral: From the Book of Saw, which indeed found Rock playing a Chris Rock-like detective named Zeke Banks, who’s hot on the trail of a brutal serial killer.
While society has seemingly memory-holed Spiral, a lot of people brought it up in response to a recent social media post asking for examples of modern movies in which stand-up comedians perform their acts in character, à la Rodney Dangerfield. A lot of people pointed to Spiral as an example of this trend.
They’re right, despite the fact that it’s set in a fictional world where grisly murder traps are seemingly one of the leading causes of death in America, Spiral is full of moments in which Rock performs routines that wouldn’t seem out of place on the stage of The Comedy Store. Like his extended bit about why there’s no sequel to Forrest Gump:
And there was almost much more stand-up-esque material in Spiral. Per director Darren Lynn Bousman, Rock was constantly ad-libbing comedic observations during the shoot. “In my first edit, which was about 50 minutes longer, I had every Chris Rock-ism in there,” Bousman told Yahoo! Entertainment.
Bousman also noticed that Rock seemed to be working through some personal issues, because a lot of his riffing was about marriage and divorce, such as during a scene in which he meets his new partner:
“That went on, and it kept going on,” Bousman explained. “I think Chris was going through a divorce, or he had just gone through a divorce so you saw a lot of his stand-up coming out in that.”
Rock was already divorced by the time Spiral was shooting in 2019, which he talked about openly in his 2018 special Tambourine. But the angry tone of the Spiral material (Detective Banks goes on a rant about his wife’s infidelities) seems more in line with the tone of 2023’s Selective Outrage, in which Rock repeatedly picked at his marital scabs (“My ex-wife is the smartest woman I know. She’s got just as much money as me — ain’t funny at all.”)
Whether or not any of the Spiral jokes that ended up on the cutting room floor made it into Rock’s act remains to be seen, but the majority of the comedic content was scrapped from the movie because they just didn’t fit with the tone of a Saw film. “We had to cut half of it out just because it got so goddamn hilarious, and we’re supposed to be building dread,” Bousman admitted.
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