Even though it came at the end of a deliberately provocative hourlong routine, it was still jarring to hear comedian Chris Rock refer to Jada Pinkett-Smith as “this b----” Saturday night, a year after he joked about her shaved head at the Oscars and her husband, Will Smith, walked onto the stage and slapped him.
Rock’s promise not to talk about Pinkett-Smith proved as false as his promise "to try to do a show tonight without offending nobody.”
“Keep my wife’s name out of your f------ mouth!” Smith yelled then, and Rock, rather obediently, said, “I’m going to.”
But Rock’s promise not to talk about Pinkett-Smith proved as false as his promise at the start of his Netflix special “Selective Outrage”: that “I’m going to try to do a show tonight without offending nobody.” Perhaps more than he ever has, he tested the audience’s tolerance. For example, in declaring himself pro-choice, Rock over and over again referred to abortion as “killing babies” and said “women should have a right to kill a baby until it’s 4 years old.”
Well after he made his audience squirm with those words, he attacked what he called the couple’s addiction to attention and Smith’s “selective outrage.” He used the b-word to describe both husband and wife, actually, but his derisive language felt in bounds for Smith but out of bounds for Pinkett-Smith.
The crowd seemed to draw in its breath when Rock, disputing the claim that he’d had a history of singling out Pinkett-Smith for ridicule, said “Nobody’s picking on this b——” and argued to the extent that there was something between them, she started it. It felt so deeply personal because it wasn’t said to get a laugh and because it felt like he was deliberately taunting her husband by disrespecting her.
People close to Rock said after last year’s Oscars that he didn’t know Pinkett-Smith’s short hair was a result of alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss, and there’s no way to prove he did know those details when he said she looked like she was filming a sequel to “G.I. Jane.” However, Saturday’s routine, during which he mentioned the couple’s TMI confession that while Smith and Pinkett-Smith say they were separated, she slept with a young friend of their family’s, felt like Rock making it cruelly plain: This is what I do when I do know the details.
Anybody who’s followed Rock’s career knows that in most of his routines, he’s bristled with anger at women. But a joke, appropriate or not, has always come with it. Saturday though, as he was fuming at one woman in particular, Rock, who was performing live, messed up the one real joke he was trying to get to, a joke that could have been the biggest of the night.
Anybody who’s followed Rock’s career knows that in most of his routines, he’s bristled with anger at women.
He was trying to say that Pinkett-Smith was upset that he’d mocked her idea of boycotting the Oscars after Smith wasn’t nominated for an award for “Concussion” and that eventually, at the Oscars, Smith gave Rock a concussion. But he wrongly said “Emancipation,” Smith’s most recent film, as he set up the joke, and it didn’t land the same when he went back and told it correctly.
Maybe it’s fitting that he flubbed it. He should take it as a sign that he should have kept his anger tightly focused on the man who struck him and not included the woman who, like everybody else that Oscar night, watched what happened.
“Everybody Hates Chris,” the brilliant coming-of-age sitcom based on Rock’s life, features a scrawny teenage Chris who is forever at the mercy of bullies and who is never the pick of girls. In that series, he is smaller, less athletic, less handsome and less charming than even his younger brother. In a September 2020 profile in “The Hollywood Reporter,” he said his bullies didn’t just beat him up; they threw balloons filled with pee at his head.
Given that in his 2018 Netflix comedy special, “Tambourine,” Rock expresses the certainty that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were bullied and that being bullied shaped them into one-of-a-kind entrepreneurs, it’s obvious that he believes being bullied shaped him into who he is: someone who can execute a bigger slap down with his words than he ever could with his hand.
And so Saturday night, he attempted to recast Smith, somebody he’s said he’d loved since his DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince days, as something other than the big, tall, handsome, silver-tongued leading man, and as something other than a husband nobly defending his wife. In pointing out he is “significantly bigger than me,” he recast Smith as a bully. He accused Smith of not having not responded as multiple celebrities had said the most disparaging things about him and about his wife’s sexual exploits — and then selectively choosing to attack Rock, somebody he “knows he can beat,” for Rock’s “G.I. Jane” joke. Rock’s characterization of Smith’s behavior contains too many expletives to put here.
Rock’s characterization of Smith’s behavior contains too many expletives to put here.
“Did it hurt?” Rock said people have asked him. “Yeah, it hurt. It still hurts.”
He clearly did not mean that there's a lingering physical pain. During the routine’s final seconds, right before he slammed his microphone to the stage with what looked like a mixture of sadness, anger and relief, Rock addressed why that Oscar debacle was particularly painful for Black people. It’s better you watch it than me describe it; suffice it to say that to the extent that the Oscar slap caused Black people pain, Rock did nothing Saturday night to help alleviate it.
