Chris Rock has been quoted as saying he considers himself one of the best stand-up comedians in the business.

He proved it last night, with raucous laughter blowing the roof off the Landmark Theater. It's a good thing the house wasn't full; anything louder and the building might have been damaged. It's getting old, you know.

Of course, part of the reason for the loudness was the sound guy, who is either severely hard of hearing or, for reasons of his own, despised the audience. The volume was absolutely brutal -- and this is for a guy who is talking, not a rock concert. When you leave, your ears shouldn't ring. Or bleed.

But even the pain of listening did little to dampen the show. The comedian was at his best when he was topical, discussing politics. He pointed out that if elected, John McCain will be 72 when he takes office ("How are you going to make decisions about the future when you aren't going to be here?") and that Hillary Rodham Clinton stayed in the race long after she had lost ("Nice girls like to leave the club before the lights come on").

Clinton, he said, should have known she would lose when she lost Iowa, a state with only four people and a state that only bought five copies of Michael Jackson's "Thriller."

Obviously excited by the prospects of Barack Obama winning the presidency -- he said white people should expect black people to take off the day after the election -- he wondered why Obama had to dissociate himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"What did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright do? A 75-year-old black man who doesn't like white people. Do you know any other kind of 75-year-old black man? His whole school class was lynched."

In his somewhat too long 100-minute set, Rock covered such topics as poverty (he tells his 5-year-old kid, "When I was your age, we were so poor I couldn't be 5 until I was 9"), women with large breasts and the fact that he thinks Osama bin Laden never existed ("He's a 7-foot-tall Muslim with diabetes who lives in a cave like Dr. Evil. There is no electricity, but his camcorder is always charged. He makes more movies than Sam Jackson").

As always, he also delineated with considerable insight the difference between blacks and whites, and between men and women. Almost none of these jokes can be quoted here.