In first post-Oscars special, Chris Rock is more mad about Jada Pinkett Smith than getting slapped
Rock ended his big Netflix special Selective Outrage by insisting that Jada Pinkett Smith is worse than the Oscars slap
This weekend, Netflix aired it’s first live-streamed comedy special, Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage, and as everyone assumed, the comedian used a good chunk of it to talk about getting slapped by Will Smith onstage at the 2022 Oscars. But, being a showman, Rock actually spent most of the special dancing around the thing people actually wanted to hear about—for the majority of the special, he avoided directly mentioning the slap, choosing instead to make winky jokes about how he doesn’t want to make fun of Snoop Dogg (for doing so many commercials) because, “the last thing I need is another mad rapper.”
Rock also joked about what the Los Angeles Times referred to as “low-hanging comic fruit,” specifically O.J. Simpson, Meghan Markle (he joked about the royal family being the original racists, but still came around to that being her fault), and the Kardashians. He also noted that he’s so pro-abortion that he’s paid for more abortions than any woman in the room. General sort of Chris Rock material, in other words.
But at the end of the show, Rock did finally go on a tear about Will Smith slapping him, but he made it clear that any problems he has are not with Will Smith; they’re with Jada Pinkett Smith. Rock said that the slap “still hurts” (adding “I got ‘Summertime’ ringing in my ears”), but that he’s not “a victim” and that he’ll never cry to “Oprah or Gayle.” Rock argued that he “took that hit like Pacquiao,” explaining that Smith “does movies with his shirt off” while he does “a movie getting open heart surgery,” joking that even in animation Smith plays a bigger guy than Rock ever will (“I’m a zebra, he’s a shark.”).
Ultimately, Rock landed on the title line of his special by saying that it’s Smith who “practices selective outrage,” explaining that he should actually be mad at Jada Pinkett Smith for cheating on him. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me,” Rock argued. “Everybody in the world called him a bitch… They called his wife a predator. And who does he hit? Me.”