Chris Tucker: Live

For the past few days after watching Chris Tucker: Live, I’ve been trying to suss out the motivation behind the 43-year-old actor and comedian finally agreeing to film a stand-up special. Until this point, he has never captured his stage work on album or in this format, outside of a few appearances on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam. To much of the world, he’s still Smokey from Friday or Det. Carter from the ridiculously popular Rush Hour films. Why finally release a special now?
Chris Tucker: Live feels like a way of reasserting his place in the pantheon of black comics. He’s still an incredibly popular stand-up, capable of drawing big crowds around the world. But his peers (Eddie Murphy, the gents from The Original Kings of Comedy) and contemporaries (Kevin Hart, Katt Williams) are the ones with syndicated TV shows or toplining films. Unless you keep yourself visible in the eyes of the populace, you risk being forgotten about.
Give him credit on doing it this way rather than signing on to do Friday After Next or a fourth Rush Hour movie. As he’s been trying to prove in recent years by taking on small film roles in Silver Linings Playbook and the upcoming adaptation of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, he has the potential of being a fine actor, so why pander?