What a gloriously easy living Chris Rock makes from his comedy

Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed.

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Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the ‘lightskin lottery’, he says) complaining to Oprah: ‘I didn’t know how racist they were.’ ‘It’s the royal family!’ expostulates Rock. ‘They’re the OGs [Original Gangstas] of racism. They’re the Sugarnill Gang of racism.’ (The 1980s cultural references give you an idea of the age of Rock’s mostly black audience at the live recording in Baltimore.)

He then goes on to point out what nonsense it is for Markle to have taken offence when her in-laws speculated on the skin colour of her offspring. ‘That’s not racist. Because even black people wanna know how brown the baby gonna be.’ This is plain common sense and also the essence of lucrative comedy: you state the bleeding obvious but in such a way as to make out you are voicing daring home truths that no one, until now, has had the outrageous courage to venture.

I personally don’t begrudge Rock the gazillions he earns from this shtick. But as with fellow masters of the art – Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle – you cannot help but think: what a gloriously easy way to earn a living! You just walk out on to a stage, on a cloud of audience approbation, and feed on their belief that whatever comes out of your mouth, even though it’s exactly what they say and think themselves all the time, is the funniest, wittiest most insightful thing on Earth.