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Chris Rock’s response to Jennifer Lawrence’s pay-gap essay: ‘Black women have the hardest gig in show business’

Comedian Chris Rock singles out Jennifer Lawrence among white actresses in a New Yorker piece about "Saturday Night Live" star Leslie Jones.

Comedian Chris Rock singles out Jennifer Lawrence among white actresses in a New Yorker piece about “Saturday Night Live” star Leslie Jones.

(Rob Latour / Invision/Associated Press)
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A short excerpt from a Leslie Jones profile has pitted comedian Chris Rock against Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence.

The “Grown Ups 2” actor was tapped for comment by the New Yorker for a profile of his pal, whom he met when they were both road comics in the late ‘80s. Not surprisingly, the piece went on about the 48-year-old “Saturday Night Live” star being pigeonholed as a black comic and her struggle to come up in the male-dominated field -- despite working for 25-plus years in stand-up and opening for the likes of Dave Chappelle and Katt Williams.

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That’s why Rock, who helped Jones secure her “SNL” gig to much fanfare in 2014, told the magazine that black women have it much harder in Tinseltown.

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“Black women have the hardest gig in show business,” Rock said. “You hear Jennifer Lawrence complaining about getting paid less because she’s a woman — if she was black, she’d really have something to complain about.”

The outspoken Oscars host was referring to “The Hunger Games” star’s viral October essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny newsletter in which she lambasted the gender pay gap in Hollywood. The Oscar winner made no mention of race in her piece, just gender inequality, which was magnified when the Sony hack revealed that she earned much less than her male costars for their work on 2013’s “American Hustle.”

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Incidentally, Rock’s remarks, appearing pretty early in the Jones piece, eclipsed the “Ghostbusters” star’s profile, which can be read in full here.

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Follow me on Twitter @NardineSaad.

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