One year after Will Smith slapped him at the Oscars, US comedian Chris Rock has finally come back fighting.
‘The slap’ repeatedly featured in the comic’s live-streamed Netflix special, which aired on Saturday night.
In Chris Rock: Selective Outrage, the 58-year-old finally gave his rebuttal in his first stand-up special since last year’s Academy Awards, which shocked the world.
For the first hour of new material, the comic touched on that infamous night, while riffing on “wokeness”, hypersensitivity and what he called “selective outrage”.
“You never know who might get triggered,” Rock told the crowd.
“Anybody who says words hurt hasn’t been punched in the face.”
The comic then launched into a series of wide-ranging topics examining contemporary issues, including virtue signalling, high-priced yoga pants, the Duchess of Sussex, the Kardashians, abortion rights, the Capitol riot and what he called America’s biggest addition: Attention.
“We used to want love, now we just want likes,” he said.
Rock made it clear that Selective Outrage was not going to be just a Will Smith show.
Only occasionally did his material dovetail into the 2022 Oscars, like it did when he joked about the oddity of Snoop Dogg becoming such a venerated pitch man for advertisers.
“I’m not dissing Snoop,” said Rock. “The last thing I need is another mad rapper.”
But an hour into his set, Rock delivered what everyone had been waiting to hear, with a torrent of material about the slap and the aftermath.
“You all know what happened to me, getting smacked by Suge Smith. Everybody knows. Everybody fucking knows,” he said.
“I got smacked like a year ago… and people are like, ‘Did it hurt?’ It still hurts. I got ‘Summertime’ ringing in my ears.”
While Smith has apologised and repeatedly spoken about the incident since last March, Rock has avoided addressing it fully until now.
“I’m a not a victim, baby,” said Rock. “You will never see me on Oprah or Gayle crying. You will never see it. Never going to happen.”
Some of his best material was on his and Smith’s physical differences.
“Will Smith is significantly bigger than me, we are not the same size. Will Smith does movies with his shirt off. You’ve never seen me do a movie with my shirt off. If I’m in a movie getting open heart surgery, I got on a sweater.
“Will Smith played Muhammad Ali in a movie, you think I auditioned for that part? I played Pookie in New Jack City. I played a piece of corn in Pootie Tang. Even in animation this motherfucker’s bigger. I’m a zebra, he’s a shark.”
Ultimately, Rock suggested he was just caught in the crossfire in Smith’s relationship with his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
It was a joke that Rock told about Pinkett Smith that prompted Smith to stride on stage and strike the comic.
“Will Smith practices ‘Selective Outrage,‘” Rock explained. “Everybody who really knows, knows I had nothing to do with that shit. I didn’t have any ‘entanglements.’
“She hurt him way more than he hurt me.”
“I love Will Smith, my whole life… he makes great movies,” Rock added. “I have rooted for Will Smith my whole life. And now I watch Emancipation just to see him get whooped.”
Chris Rock: Selective Outrage, which was filmed at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, marked Netflix’s first foray into live streaming and is Rock’s second special for the streaming platform, following 2018’s Tambourine.
They are part of a two-special 40 million US dollar deal Rock signed with Netflix in 2016.
For much of the past year, Rock has been touring new material in a long string of performances as part of his Ego Death tour.
The shows, which had been announced before the 2022 Oscars, have featured performances with Dave Chappelle and Kevin Hart.
On the road, Rock has often worked in jokes and reflections on the slap.
In the aftermath of last year’s events, Smith resigned his membership to the film academy.
The Academy board of governors banned Smith from the Oscars and all other Academy events for a decade.
At the annual luncheon for nominees held last month, Motion Picture Academy President Janet Yang voiced regret about how the incident was handled, calling the Academy’s response “inadequate”.
Bill Kramer, the Academy’s Chief Executive, has said the Academy has since instituted a crisis communications team to prepare for and more rapidly respond to the unexpected.
Additional reporting by PA.