MORAN, Wyo. — At around 10 p.m. Thursday at the Diamond Cross Ranch here, Chris Rock stepped up on a small platform, looked out over a few hundred people huddled around a wildly flickering bonfire, and leaned in to his convocation.

“I touched a moose!” he exclaimed, “and the moose said to me, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of …’” — well, let’s just say people who don’t ordinarily gather on a ranch in Wyoming. He nodded toward the fire. “Tomorrow night that will be a cross,” he deadpanned.

Hip-hop, he said, is “the first art form created by free black men” (though jazz would probably quibble with that characterization). He continued, “No black man has taken more advantage of his freedom than Kanye West.”