Laughing along the way

Billy Ray Rock’s stand-up career started with a casual remark to a buddy during an open mic in his then hometown of Fresno, Calif.: When Rock said the guy up there was terrible, his friend said, “You wouldn’t go up there, would you?”

“I went up there and also sucked,” he said during a recent interview in his current hometown of Asotin. “Came back the next week — sucked again. It became like a personal challenge with me.”

It got worse before it got better.

One night he wrote his jokes on Post-it notes and stuck them to the mic stand “like a little Christmas tree.” He must have looked nervous and sweaty, because the stage manager turned on a fan: notes everywhere.

Though he “still sucked,” he was getting advice about how to improve, mainly by telling his story.

The first big laughter he got, Rock said, was with a joke about having 13 people in his family, something along the lines of “My family’s so big, my father’s got stretch marks.”

People started hitting him up for birthday parties, company parties — and he got funnier and funnier, Rock said.

He was attending a police academy at the time, on his way to becoming a cop. Soon he found himself chasing felons, getting shot at and entertaining a new thought: “Hecklers don’t shoot.”

Figuring he could be broke doing what he didn’t want to do or doing what he wanted to do, he said goodbye to police work and “left it to the comedy gods.”

He’s been doing comedy full time ever since.

Originally from Fresno, Rock tried out the Hollywood scene in Los Angeles, worked out of the Bay Area for a stretch and eventually moved with his wife from Sacramento to the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley, where she is from, to bring up their children in a quieter place. Now he splits his time between their home in Asotin and being on the road.

He said he sees himself primarily as a comedian and musician (he plays in the neighborhood of a dozen instruments), but acting gigs have punctuated his career.

He appeared in the 1990s-era movies “Boyz n the Hood” and “Natural Born Killers” and on HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam” series. Fast forward a couple of dozen years, and the television series “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner, was casting for extras.

Rock, who’d been driving back and forth to Montana for comedy gigs, rented a place there so he’d have somewhere to stay, and having a Montana address qualified him to audition for the show.

He landed a role and appears in the current and final season of the Western, which wraps next month on the Paramount Network — but he isn’t allowed to disclose much about it.

“It’s kinda weird. It’s kinda surreal,” he said. “Of all the shows I thought I’d be in, ‘Yellowstone’ doesn’t even make the top 50.”

Because of the way the show is filmed and edited, even Rock doesn’t know which episodes he’s in. The only people who really know, he said, are the show’s editors and its creator, Taylor Sheridan.

While it’s hard to say when you’ll be able to catch him on television, his next comedy gig is this weekend — and it’s local: Rock headlines a comedy night Saturday in Orofino that also includes Alex Kaufman, from Bozeman, Mont., and Orofino comedian John Thomas.

Stone (she/her) can be contacted at mstone@inland360.com.

If You Go

What: Comedy night with Billy Ray Rock, special guest Alex Kaufman and local talent John Thomas.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday; doors open 6 p.m.

Where: The Red Door Tattoo, Bar and Cafe, 146 Johnson Ave., Orofino.

Cost: No cover.

Of note: Rock describes his comedy as a combination of one-liners and rants: “My show is an adult thing, but I don’t cuss and swear all day,” he said. “There’s two things I don’t do: I don’t do politics, and I don’t talk about abortion. No matter what subject I’m talking about, I try to bring people together.”