Comedian Chris Rock doesn’t hold back in his latest comedy special, Selective Outrage, which premiered on Netflix. One topic in particular was eagerly awaited – Will Smith’s Oscar slap, which happened almost exactly a year ago live in front of a horrified audience of millions. As you’d expect, Rock has some heavy punch lines up his sleeve.
Again and again he is asked whether the slap hurt. “It still hurts!” After all, the two are completely different weight classes. “Will Smith is significantly taller than me and he does movies where he takes his shirt off. You’ve never seen me in a movie where I take my shirt off. If I ever had open-heart surgery in a movie, I would wearing a sweater.”
One fact would particularly illustrate the physical difference between the two men: “Will Smith played Muhammad Ali in a film – do you think I auditioned for the role? […] Even in animated films, the bastard is taller than me . I’m a zebra and he’s a shark.”
Rock lashes out much more meanly towards the actor regarding his motivation for the bell. This is also one of the reasons why he called his program “Selective Outrage”, i.e. “selected outrage”. It was not the shallow joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s bald head that led to her husband’s outburst of anger and violence. But, according to Rock, the fact that Jada had previously spoken publicly about an infidelity and also talked to her husband about it on her show “Red Table Talk”.
Rock’s blunt words: “His wife did it with her son’s boyfriend. Normally I wouldn’t mention that shit […]. We’ve all been cheated on, everyone in this room has been cheated on. But none of us have been interviewed on TV by the person who betrayed us. She hurt him a lot worse than he hurt me.”
Smith was then pulled through the cocoa everywhere in the US media – for example on “The View,” “The Talk,” “The Breakfast Club” or “Drink Champs”. Rock is sure that he had to pay the bill for all the scorn on the said Oscar night: “Everyone called him a ‘bitch’ and who does he hit for it? Me.”
In his thesis that attention has become the “biggest addiction in America”, the name Duchess Meghan (41) also falls. He doesn’t buy the claim made in the infamous Oprah interview that she didn’t know anything about the British royal family: “What the hell is she talking about, she wouldn’t have known her? That’s the royal family. That’s the original racists. They invented colonialism!”
