About a year has passed since Smith interrupted Rock’s hosting duties and slapped him in the face for making a joke about Jada Pinkett-buzzed Smith’s head. This weekend, Netflix will stream its first live broadcast. And with that, it marks one year since the incident, but it will also finally mark the time where Chris Rock would finally get to address that same incident.
Events After
The consequences of the incident were severe, and Smith‘s resignation from the Academy and a ten-year Oscars ban were just two of them. The Academy Awards even created a “crisis team” this year to avoid a repeat of the previous catastrophe. Rock and Smith exchanged public apologies five months after the slap, but despite Rock’s brief mention of the incident in his stand-up routine, he has never gone into further detail or expressed his public forgiveness for Smith. Rock is now prepared to confront the slap directly in a test pilot for Netflix’s first live stream.
His Thoughts About It
Last year, during a global tour with Dave Chappelle, both Rock and Chappelle took turns making fun of Smith. Now it’s unclear how much of Rock’s hour-long Netflix performance, which was broadcast live from Baltimore‘s Hipporodrome Theatre, will be about the Smith incident. Yet it appears that fans are hanging out for quite a bit of material centered on the slap, judging by the title of the comedy special, Selective Outrage. The Wall Street Journal reports that Rock had been experimenting with the idea of “selective outrage” in more recent stand-up performances, and that he tended to concentrate on what he believes truly precipitated Smith’s slap and why he chose not to retaliate.
Chris will talk about the subject again after this. In his stand-up routines in the past, he has discussed it, but never in such length. According to reports, Chris Rock worked on the Netflix special in January and teased it to his audience at a Charlestown arena show where he performed alongside Dave Chappelle. He talked about the now-famous incident with Will Smith back then. He also made some jokes regarding the general indignation that followed the incident.
