Chris Rock’s New Netflix Special ‘Tamborine’ Pulls No Punches

Netflix released Chris Rock’s new stand–up special Tamborine on Wednesday .

This is Rock’s first stand-up special in ten years, and he’s doing it different.

He’s showing another side of himself, and he’s getting real – talking about race, his divorce, his porn addiction, police shootings and raising his kids. Some of topics he’s tackled before but now there’s a greater intimacy.

Bo Burnham, director of the special, told Splitsider, “something that Chris really wanted — was to feel the intimacy of the space and feel how close the audience was to him. In a lot of his other specials, he’s playing to 3,500-seat theaters where the stage was towering above the crowd. But in Tamborine, he’s six feet away from the front row. And because of the space, the audience is almost ranked above him.”

Burnham noted that while filming the special to get a feel for Rock’s set he split it in two parts, the classic and the personal. “The special to me has two very specific halves. The front half he’s delivering this classic Chris Rock stuff that you know and expect from him, stuff about the world and politics and the state of culture. Then in the second half he goes personal in a way that he never has before.”

Reviews of Tamborine have been strong so far. “He’s a veteran now, an avatar of the craft,” Vulture wrote.

Rock’s years of comedy and uninhibited nature give him them credibility to drop line such as, “You think every once in a while the cops would shoot a white kid just to make it look good.”