Rock ranges from solid to unsavory

Chris Rock (above in Tennes-see) is using new material. (Jeff gentner/getty images)

Chris Rock wasn't just a comedian at the Citi Performing Arts Center Saturday night. He was, by his own admission, an "antidepressant," a man funny enough to make Prozac and Xanax seem redundant. This was true: He was funny, but often just funny enough. Rock has been touring the world with a show of new material (it's called "No Apologies"), and on the second performance of his Boston stand, he still seemed to be trying to find coherence in disparate subjects - from the candidates for president and performance-enhancing drugs to the moribund dollar, our gas crisis, and, of course, American racism.

For close to 90 minutes, playing to a full, ecstatic house, Rock summoned some of the devastating wit and a lot of the electric exasperation that made him a huge star after HBO aired his special "Bring the Pain" 12 years ago. In a terrific teal suit, he tried to make sense of the state the country is in without really coming to any transcendent conclusions. There were some characteristically brilliant insights. He surmised that John McCain ("I don't want a president with a bucket list!") wouldn't dredge up Jeremiah Wright to sully Barack Obama this fall. McCain just has to put Flavor Flav before the American people, and they'll connect the (imaginary) dots.

But the reverse cultural therapy Rock can provide - wherein the therapist does all the salubrious talking - never, in this new show, achieved the two-way catharsis he reached in his special and on his defunct self-titled variety series. His presidential stuff was exciting because it was topical, and because Rock is the person you most want to hear address a race for president, especially this race. But he doesn't sound like he knows where he stands on the issues - on the substantive presidential issues, anyway.

If Rock seemed mild about Obama and McCain, he was his lacerating self only when it came to women and his reductive feelings about them. (Those were on display in the movie he directed last year, "I Think I Love My Wife"). He conjured an unsavory analogy for Hillary Clinton's exacting exit from the presidential race: "Classy girls leave the club an hour before the lights came up. [Unclassy girls] roam the parking lot." We all laughed at the comparison. But the parallel was incongruous: How exactly was Hillary a parking lot roamer? He never said.

There were some promising thoughts on why Michelle Obama - and, by extension, any black woman - would be a terrible first lady (no black woman would ever recede into the background). But Rock occasionally lost his train of thought (he never finished ruminating on how exactly an Obama presidency might go).

"No Apologies" is backloaded with sex and relationship material it feels like he covered a decade ago. It's funny. But it's tedious, and a little hateful, too. Rock's friend, the scandalously underrated Mario Joyner, warmed up the crowd with some piercing dating observations. With Rock, it sounded like he was trying to explain women to both themselves and himself. At best, his observations were shopworn with some truth. At worst they feel vaguely disingenuous. The one thing missing from these areas of new stuff is an explicit connection between the comedian and his observations. We can glimpse the autobiography by reading between the lines, but he needs a fresh approach to his thoughts on relationships.

The marital struggles in "Bring the Pain" represent an honest and searing account of the pros and cons of commitment. If Rock is still in crisis it'd be moving and probably very funny to see him struggle before us.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.