For months after last year’s Oscars, it seemed all anyone could talk about was “the Slap”—when Will Smith stormed onto the stage and slapped host Chris Rock for a tasteless joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. For the first 60 minutes of his new stand-up special, Selective Outrage, Rock manages to avoid mentioning the couple, the incident, or the discussions that emerged afterward. Even so, viewers know what’s coming.
“Y’all know what happened to me, getting smacked by Suge Smith,” Rock says near the end of the special. “Everybody fucking knows.”
Rock seems to resent at least the narrative that emerged post-slap. At the time, some social media users and culture writers argued that Rock’s joke was a textbook example of misogynoir, a specific kind of contempt reserved for Black women. On a national stage, the comedian, who once produced a documentary about Black women’s relationship with their hair, compared Pinkett Smith to the character G.I. Jane because of her hair—in spite of her well-documented struggle with alopecia, a condition that affects hair growth. (Rock has said he was not aware of Pinkett Smith’s alopecia at the time.)
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His choice of words to sum up what happened at last year’s Oscars is telling: “Nobody’s picking on this bitch,” Rock says in the special. “She started this shit.”
Rock is referring to the Oscars ceremony in 2016, when Pinkett Smith urged him to boycott the event after multiple Black-led films, including the Smith vehicle Concussion, did not receive a nomination. (This was the same year that #OscarsSoWhite went viral.) “She said, me, a grown-ass man, should quit his job [as 2016 Oscars host] because her husband didn't get nominated for Concussion,” Rock says, incredulous. “Then he gave me a concussion!”
Those who’ve been keeping track of this beef for a while know that Rock made sure to ridicule Pinkett Smith during the 2016 ceremony as well. “Jada’s gonna boycott the Oscars?” he said on stage then. “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited!”
Masculinity feels like a dominant theme of the final section of Rock’s special. The comedian emotionally relives the year-old slap on stage, while insisting that in spite of his palpable upset, “I’m not a victim, baby. … You will never see me on Oprah or Gayle crying. … I took that hit like [boxer Manny] Pacquiao.” Before long, we arrive at his thesis, which doubles as the special’s title: “Will Smith practices selective outrage,” Rock argues, “... because everybody knows what the fuck happened. Everybody that really knows, knows I had nothing to do with that shit. I didn’t have any ‘entanglements.’”
As anyone who went online in the summer of 2020 likely knows, Rock is referring to the Smiths’ discussion of Pinkett Smith’s extra-marital activities with musician August Alsina. The revelation, fueled by mounting social media gossip, was ultimately discussed by the couple during a candid, extremely viral episode of Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk. While Pinkett Smith called her time with Alsina an “entanglement,” Rock chooses crasser terms, saying that Pinkett Smith was “fucking her son’s friend.” Never mind that the couple has openly explained that their relationship is non-monogamous, or that Rock also openly boasts about his preference for dating younger women during the same special. As he puts it, “I didn’t get rich and stay in shape to talk to Anita Baker. I’m trying to fuck Doja Cat.”
In a 2021 GQ profile, Smith said that at one point during his and Pinkett Smith’s marriage, they chose to become non-monogamous. “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way,” Smith said. “And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our road for anybody. … But the experiences that the freedoms that we’ve given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love.”
Rock seems to reject the idea that Smith entered into this arrangement willingly, implying instead that Pinkett Smith humiliated her husband with her infidelity. His summation? “She hurt him way more than he hurt me.”
Rock’s special might succeed in reminding Hollywood that it’s mad at Smith for disrupting its sense of propriety, but it’s also garnered some negative attention. April Reign, who created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in 2015—the year Concussion was among the Black-led films excluded from the awards—noted on Twitter that, although Rock does not mention Pinkett Smith by name, “he did call her a b*tch, and that seems just as bad, if not worse. TO ME.” Other critics chimed in to voice their disapproval of the Rock’s act.
It is curious that even after being slapped on live television, Rock cannot pass up an opportunity to needle Pinkett Smith—who did not lift a finger that night. Smith made his intentions clear as he sat down post-slap that night, yelling at Rock to keep “my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth.” In Rock’s estimation, it appears that Pinkett Smith deserves not only the jokes at her expense but also the blame for her husband’s actions. She’s cuckolded Smith, Rock implies, and rather than assert his dominance, Smith relented—and chose to rough him up instead.
“Everybody in the world called him a bitch,” Rock says of Smith, toward the special’s end. “I tried to call the motherfucker and give him my condolences. He didn’t pick up for me. Everybody called that man a bitch … and who does he hit? Me. … That is some bitch-ass shit.”
One could make that argument. Then again, one could also say the same thing about hashing out extremely stale gossip in a stand-up special.
