It has been six years since Rock’s last special, “Kill the Messenger,” and so, even while finishing “Top Five,” he has been making occasional forays to comedy clubs to work on his new set. On a recent Friday night, Rock turned up at the Comedy Cellar, in Greenwich Village, where Estee Adoram, the club’s longtime booker, is always happy to squeeze him into the schedule. Colin Quinn, a friend from the early days, was there, having just performed. “Good shit, man,” Rock said, and asked Quinn about his girlfriend. “You going to marry her?”

“Aw, leave me alone,” Quinn said, fondly, before making an escape.

Rock installed himself at a table marked “Reserved” in the restaurant, upstairs, and ordered some French fries, a Coke, and a chocolate milkshake. He had with him some sheets of cardboard—the remnants of notebooks whose pages had long ago been ripped out—covered with brief phrases. This is how he writes down his routines, using a technique borrowed from his paternal grandfather, who was a cabdriver during the week and a preacher on the weekends; the idea is to always be talking, instead of reading. He managed to eat a few fries before Adoram gave him a cue, and he hopped down a narrow staircase in the back just in time to hear the m.c. say his name, and to hear the audience react with stunned jubilation. “It’s not going to be that good—not at these prices,” he said, when he got to the low stage. (Admission was twenty-four dollars, plus a minimum of two items from the menu.) “At these prices, I could leave right now!” He imagined the reviews: “Chris Rock came out and he left—it was good! He didn’t tell any jokes, but it was good!”

When Rock goes on tour, he is conscious of giving the audience a show: a sharp suit, a crisp set, a ferocious attitude. But on nights like this, when he is testing out material, he changes his body language in an attempt to create the conditions for a clinical trial: he wants to find out which jokes work even when he’s not selling them. He slumps against the back wall, fidgets with the microphone stand, pauses to examine his paperless notebooks. “It’s a gym,” he likes to say—a place to work out, not to show off. He looked out at the crowd, speaking mainly to himself: “What am I going to talk about?”

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There was plenty: a long bit about religion and a short one about bullying, and also a withering take on the alleged coolness of President Obama. “Obama’s, like, cool compared to other politicians—but not as cool as actual cool people,” he said. “Like, Miles Davis would kick Obama in the fuckin’ teeth!” Someone suggested that he say something about the new iPhone, but Rock preferred to consider Ray Rice and Chris Brown, two of the many celebrities who have been caught behaving badly in the years since Rock last toured. “People say there’s no reason to ever hit a woman,” he said. “No—there’s no reason to ever hit a woman first. You can hit a woman back—shit, if Oprah hit me I’d knock her the fuck out!” The absurd image gave the crowd permission to laugh at an idea that it didn’t necessarily endorse, and Rock pressed on, recalling the media coverage of Brown’s assault on Rihanna, who was then his girlfriend. “No one ever asked the question ‘Who hit first?’ ” he said. “Best journalists in the world, not one asked the question. ‘It’s not important.’ Yes, it is! It’s the most important question on earth.”

The laughter was dying down. “The United States bombed fuckin’ Japan,” he said. “We killed so many people—like, twelve 9/11s on one day. Because they hit first,” he said. “We’re bombing up Syria—they cut off two people’s heads!” His voice was getting higher and more insistent—he sounded about seventy per cent earnest. “We’re going to kill hundreds of thousands of people! And it’s O.K.!” He got quiet, and the laughter returned, as the audience warmed to the punch line: “Because they hit first.”

After about fifteen minutes onstage, he walked through the crowd and upstairs to his table, where a waiter brought back his half-eaten French fries and half-finished milkshake. “There’s no rich way to do standup,” he said. “You’ve got to go to the same club you started at, be around the same bunch of guys you knew twenty-five years ago. You’re going to go onstage, and they’re either going to laugh or they’re not. They’ll give you about six minutes because you’re famous. And then you’re back to square one.”

As much as possible, Rock moves through the city as if he were not famous. “The average guy that’s been in as many movies as I have been in—and is black, or whatever—would have three people outside that door,” he said, one afternoon, after arriving unaccompanied for a meeting. “The driver downstairs would have a walkie-talkie, and they would correspond: ‘O.K., we’re moving him downstairs.’ No disrespect to anybody, but my heroes were different. Woody Allen doesn’t walk around with a bunch of random people, you know what I mean?”

Rock doesn’t think of himself as unusually funny. “I’m not the funniest person I know,” he says. “I’m not the tenth-funniest person I know. I wasn’t the funniest guy on my block. I wasn’t the funniest guy in the clubs.” To compensate, he says, he had to outwork everyone else. “My nickname for him is the Duke of Doubt,” Nelson George says. “He’s not someone who revels in his successes. He’s already contemplating the next argument, the next thing that could go wrong.”

For many people who knew Rock, his underwhelming film career was something of a running joke. George remembers that filmmaker friends of his used to say, “We love Chris, but he really shouldn’t direct anymore.” The comic and writer Neal Brennan, the co-creator of “Chappelle’s Show,” has known Rock for more than a decade, and served as a consultant on “Top Five.” He says that for years he was puzzled by the disjunction between Rock’s meticulously written standup sets and his seemingly tossed-off movies—everything he wrote, produced, or directed had been, essentially, a high-concept remake. “He likes being blue-collar: he likes that his dad was blue-collar, and he brought that blue-collar ethic to standup,” Brennan says. “But he never brought that blue-collar ethic to movies. This is the first time. And he did it—he’ll hate me for saying this—because Scott Rudin made him.”

Rudin and Rock became close four years ago, after Rudin approached him with what sounded like a bad idea: to play a lead role in a new play called “The Motherfucker with the Hat,” by Stephen Adly Guirgis, which would make its début on Broadway. “It read like something he’d written,” Rudin says. “You read it, you couldn’t help hearing the words come from his mouth.” Rock’s character, Ralph, was a recovering alcoholic, a seeming beacon of good sense who slowly reveals himself to be a cold-blooded opportunist. The director, Anna D. Shapiro, hesitated to cast Rock, but was worn down first by Rudin’s enthusiasm and then by Rock’s willingness to audition, and by his commitment to developing a different kind of stage presence. “Chris is used to making eye contact with the audience,” Shapiro says. “The audience shifts and changes, and he rides that.” In rehearsal, she sometimes had to admonish him for looking at her—he needed to learn to resist his habit of reading the room.

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It was a difficult production—Guirgis kept rewriting all the way through the previews—but the critical notice, during the play’s four-month run, was mainly kind. For Rock, the experience was transformative: he was impressed by Guirgis’s ability to write new lines every day, and by his own ability to learn them and then deliver them only a few hours later. (As a standup, Rock typically doesn’t say anything in a theatre that he hasn’t already said, hundreds of times, in a small club.) The play helped him realize that a dramatic project could be as difficult, and as rewarding, as standup. “I think when Chris came to do ‘Motherfucker’ he was sleepwalking, a little bit, in his life,” Shapiro says. By the time the play was finished, Rock was ready to work just as hard on a film.