WARNING: This post contains very strong language and racial slurs used onstage: “Anybody that says words hurt has never been punched in the face,” Chris Rock said with a well-timed figurative wink tonight right at the start of his live Netflix special Selective Outrage.
Starting off with a backstage montage of a Prince pendant-wearing Rock heading toward the stage, the special from Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre quickly launched into the comic taking pretty standard swings at the selective outrage of the woke crowd, “everybody scared and full of shit,” corporate charity, and “yoga pants politics.” Only with a swipe at “the kind of people who play Michael Jackson songs, but not R. Kelly,” did Rock venture from his Joe Rogan playlist
“Same crime — one has better songs.”
As somewhat less skillful than usual, but masterfully paced as Rock’s routine was from the get-go and his poignant if dated take on “White Planet of the Apes sh*t” of the January 6 attack of the Capitol, that initial material and the set-ups that followed wasn’t truly what the audience, virtual and actual, came for.
They came for Rock’s response to Will Smith. They came to hear what Chris Rock would say about being slapped by Smith at last year’s Oscars after the presenting comic mocked the illness induced bald head of the Best Actor nominee’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
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Rock knew that’s what they came for, and he knew that’s what Netflix wanted too. But before he got there, the comic took digs at Elon Musk, the Kardashians, OJ Simpson and Meghan Markle that were tired a long time ago. Stepping back from the edge he has so long balanced on in what was a lead up to the real event, Rock then stomped into an often-unsteady overview of the hot button topics like the reactions to the Trans community, abortion rights in America, his dating life and Beyoncé.
After that face-punch quip and a “last thing I need is another mad rapper” tease out of an early Snoop Dogg joke and later Jay-Z aside, it was 61-minutes into the special before Rock gave the people what they really wanted.
Then it was all christians, lions and insider trading.
“It hurt,” Rock bluntly said of “Suge Smith,” mixing the name of the incarcerated Death Row Records boss and the King Richard Oscar winner. “It still hurts, I got ‘Summertime’ ringing in my ears, but I’m not a victim,” Rock added with lines that he’s been workshopping on stage for months to various degrees. “You will never see me on Oprah crying …no. It’s never gonna happen No, f*ck this, I took that hit like Pacquiao.”
References to old DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince tunes and the legendary boxer Manny Pacquiao aside, Rock’s nearly seven-minute apotheosis of his special was actually less about the slap itself and more an evisceration of Smith’s marriage and the alleged infidelities that occurred within that union.
With the clocking ticking on a special that was supposed to last an hour, Rock went up to bat:
Smith practices selective outrage … selective outrage because everybody knows what the f*ck happened. Everybody that really knows knows I had nothing to do with that sh*t. I didn’t have any entanglements. An entanglement, for people that don’t know what everybody else will, it is his wife was f*cking her son’s friend. OK. Now I normally would not talk about this sh*t. But for some reason these [n-words] put that sh*t on the internet. I have no idea why two talented people would do something that fucking lowdown — what the f*ck?
Rock went on to say:
Why would you do that shit. She hurt him way more than he hurt me. Okay, and by the way he does this. Everybody in the world called him a b*tch. I tried to call the mother*cker …and he wouldn’t pick up for me. Everybody called that man up …everybody called him a b*tch. Everybody, and whose he hit? Me. A (n-word) he knew he could beat, that is some b*tch ass sh*t
Entering into the final stretch of a well-honed rope-a-dope, Rock brought it all back to The Red Table host:
She started this sh*t. Nobody was picking on her. She said of me, a f*cking grown ass man should quit his job (as the 2016 Oscar host) because her husband didn’t get nominated for Concussion. And then this (n-word) gives me a f*cking concussion.
What the f*ck, man?
I love Will Smith my whole life. I love this (n-word). I saw him open up for Run DMC at Nassau Coliseum. These (n-word) made brand new funk. I love this (n-word). He’s made some great movies I have rooted for Will Smith my whole life. I root for this mother*cker. Okay, and now I watch Emancipation just to see him get whopped. Got me rootin for massa, okay? Now hit him again, massa. Hit him again. You missed a spot massa, you missed a spot.
“A lot of people go, ‘Chris, how come you didn’t do nothing back’ How come you didn’t go back that night?’ Because I got parents. That’s why,” he declared. “I got parents, and you know what my parents taught me: Don’t fight in front of white people.” Rock said closing out his special to a standing ovation.
Rock’s swipes at the former Fresh Prince and the whole Oscars 2022 fiasco were neither a real surprise nor perfunctorily. If there was any doubt he was going to eventually go there, the viral tsunami of the comic’s knock last September onstage at London’s O2 Arena with Dave Chappelle at the “hostage video” of Smith’s YouTube apology and the size difference between the two actors set the table everyone wanted a seat at.
There was only one topic that would fuel Rock’s second Netflix special under the $40 million two-special deal he inked with the streamer in 2016: It had to be Will Smith.
Still, while Rock has known for months that this is what his fans wanted to hear, the comedian displayed more bite and polish tonight than in previous on- or offstage circumspect comments on the subject. In fact, over the span of Rock’s long career, the segment on the slap live on Saturday most closely resembled his coruscating and very personal remarks in 2017 shows on his divorce.
Comedy always has been Netflix’s difference engine — from the early days of a decade ago with shows seeming shot with two cameras dangling from the rafters to the global introduction of the talents of Ali Wong, Hannah Gadsby and Ronny Chieng and the millions now paid out to Chappelle, Amy Schumer and Wanda Skyes. A personal jewel to co-CEO Ted Sarandos, the relatively inexpensive art of laughter propelled the streamer’s inventory and its notoriety long before the pricey original dramas and sitcoms took center stage — and still does, as tonight’s show aimed to prove.
In that context, hyped with a pre-show featuring stand-up superstars, Rock’s special is a perfect test case for a new live formula that Netflix clearly is committed to. Putting such a heavyweight up first and wrapped in anticipation and controversary, Selective Outrage was as close to a sure thing as you can have, notwithstanding any technical glitches.
And the timing certainly didn’t hurt.
Now, coming just under a year from the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, Smith’s onstage blow and the subsequent fumbling-and-stumbling response by AMPAS leadership at the time that resulted eventually in Smith being tossed out of an organization he’d already quit, it also can’t hurt that Rock has cred to burn, having turned down the Academy’s offer to host this year’s Oscars — which would have been his third stint.
With that, the spotlight to talk about Smith’s assault has been on Rock literally since he stepped off the Dolby Theatre stage on March 27, 2022. Some 72 hours after the incident, Rock opened a long planned tour in Boston to a crowd now looking for some very new material. The comic and actor told the cheering audience that he was “still kinda processing what happened” and that “at some point” he will talk about “that sh*t,” and “it will be serious, and it will be funny.”
Tonight was that “some point.” And, as Rock himself said near the beginning: “You never know who might get triggered.”
