Chris Rock discusses his NLVD

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The far bigger commitment has been therapy, however; seven hours a week, he says with unmistakable pride. His decision to seek meaningful help for the first time in his life was precipitated by a friend’s suggestion that he may have Asperger’s. It prompted a nine-hour battery of cognitive tests earlier this year, from which doctors diagnosed Rock with a condition called nonverbal learning disorder, or NVLD. As he’s come to understand it, he has tremendous difficulty with non-verbal signals — which doesn’t sound too drastic until, as he explains, you consider that some 80 percent of communication is nonverbal. "And all I understand are the words," he says.

Rock often takes things too literally as a result and, like others with the condition, suffers from a kind of all-or-nothing thinking. "By the way, all of those things are really great for writing jokes — they’re just not great for one-on-one relationships," he says. Until now, it’s made much of Rock’s life uncomfortable. "And I’d always just chalked it up to being famous. Any time someone would respond to me in a negative way, I’d think, 'Whatever, they’re responding to something that has to do with who they think I am.' Now, I’m realizing it was me. A lot of it was me."

So, with the aid of two therapists, he’s been trying to make sense of his limitations and the toll that childhood trauma has taken on him. Sure, he’s been joking about the latter for decades — at one point, it fueled an entire sitcom, Everybody Hates Chris, which ran for four celebrated seasons in the mid-2000s. And because he was able to laugh about it, he thought he was over it. "I thought I was actually dealing with it, and the reality is I never dealt with it," he says. "The reality was the pain and the fear that that brought me, I was experiencing it every day."

Brennan can’t help but appreciate the irony, given how much Rock ribbed him over the years for his own embrace of therapy. "He’d call it 'white people problems' or 'rich people problems,' and I’d be like, ' Dude, your body doesn’t know what f*****g class you’re in,' " says the comic. Now, instead of arguing about feelings, the two actually talk about them. "Chris will still write as a caustic person because he’s got a f*****g bleak point of view, but now he can do it with a bit of empathy for himself."

Does that make Chris one of us?