Chris Rock adds Broadway to his funny resume

NEW YORK – How do you top a winter in which you've made fun of Oprah Winfrey to her face, gleefully butchered a classic Simon and Garfunkel song during a telethon and made a guest appearance on Kanye West's mega-selling CD?

If you're Chris Rock, the next stop is Broadway.

"I always look for everything," says the comedian, sitting at a table at the theater-district hangout Sardi's before rehearsals of his new gritty play by Stephen Adly Guirgis.

"You want to give your audience something funny or something good — that can be anything. It can be a play, it can be a movie," he says. "Hey, I was on Kayne's record! That's funnier than probably anything I've done in a couple of years. You know what I mean? How can I be funny this year?"

The answer now is "The Motherf----- With the Hat," a play that Rock describes as "`The Honeymooners' with drugs." It's about a man on parole and trying to live clean with his volatile girlfriend, who is far from sober. Rock, making his Broadway debut, plays the man's drug counselor.

"Honestly, it was the best thing I read all last year. It was better than every movie script, every book — it was better than everything," he says. "I read a couple of other plays and thought, `This is easily the best one I've read.'" (AP)