“Allowance? I allow you to sleep at night. Things go haywire, however, when Rochelle (now reduced to getting her sugar fix from pancake syrup) catches Julius sneaking out to play the Pick 5.Īnd during one dinner, when Chris finally gets up the courage to ask for an allowance, Julius delivers a lecture familiar to every working-class kid. In another, Julius and Rochelle (Chris’s mother) agree to give up their luxuries (his lottery tickets and her chocolate turtles) in order to pay the gas bill. Unlike other blue-collar comedies (e.g., According to Jim, Still Standing and King of Queens) which signify their characters’ working-class status via lifestyle choices (i.e., wearing Harley shirts, drinking beer, listening to Aerosmith, etc.), EHC generates much of its comedy directly from the class-based experience of struggling paycheck to paycheck and never having enough to pay the bills.Īnd so, in one episode, we see Julius buying the family’s appliances from Risky, the neighborhood fence, because the department store is simply out of reach. But what I like most about EHC is how it foregrounds the experience of class inequality. To be sure, as a former early 1980s middle-schooler myself, I enjoy the retro references to Atari, velour shirts, and Prince’s Purple Rain. Somebody better drink that!” And when someone tosses a chicken leg into the garbage, we see Julius peer over the rim, grab it, and exclaim, with a pained look on his face, “that’s a dollar nine cent in the trash!” That’s two cents an hour.” When the kids knock over a glass at breakfast, Julius says, “that’s 49 cent of spilled milk dripping all over my table. When Chris goes to sleep, Julius tells him, “unplug that clock, boy. Julius, it turns out, has a particular talent for knowing the cost of everything. Early in the show, we learn that Julius Rock, Chris’s father, works two jobs and counts every penny. Class issues are largely explored in Chris’s home life, while the show’s writers use Chris’s travails at Corleone to foreground questions of race. In this way, two social spaces generate most of the show’s comic energy. His excitement vanishes, however, when his mother informs him that he’ll be taking two buses everyday to become the only black student at Corleone Middle School-all the way out in white working-class Brooklyn Beach. Young Chris is excited about the move and the adolescent adventures that await him now that he’s turned thirteen. The Rock family has just moved out of the projects and into their new home-a two-level apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In the pilot, we learn the basic premises of EHC. This particular shot comes in the middle of the pilot episode of Everybody Hates Chris, a semi-autobiographical sitcom that chronicles the middle-school experiences of comedian Chris Rock in early 1980s Brooklyn. One of the best things I’ve seen on television recently was shot from the perspective of a garbage can.
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