Comedian Chris Rock is tired of talking about the Oscars slap but clearly not!
In a new comedy special called “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage” streamed live on Netflix over the weekend Rock, 58, spoke at length about the 2022 Academy Awards incident.
Alluding to the slap Chris said, “You know what people say, they say, ‘words hurt…Anybody that say words hurt has never been punched in the face.”
The incident globally referred to as ‘The Oscars slap’ occurred at the Oscars on March 27, 2022. Rock, who was making a presentation for Best Documentary Feature, made a hair joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith who suffers from alopecia when Smith walked onstage and slapped him.
Will Smith was allowed to remain at the ceremony and later that night accepted his first-ever Oscar for Best Actor.
In the streaming service’s first live comedy show, Rock tackled a wide range of issues, including woke culture, Meghan Markle and politics.
He began by saying, “I’m going to try to do the show without offending anyone because you never know who might get triggered.”
He, however, used the back end of the special to talk about the slap.
“People are like, ‘Did it hurt?’ It still hurts! I got “Summertime” ringing in my ears,” Rock said, referring to Smith’s 1991 single.
“I took that hit like (Manny) Pacquiao,” Rock boasted to cheers from the crowd.
In a nod to the show’s title, Rock said he believes Smith practises “selective outrage” and that the slap had more to do with Smith and his wife, Jada’s, relationship struggles, than his Oscars joke.
The couple has been candid about the ups and downs of their relationship and even publicly addressed their struggles on Jada’s Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk.
“We’ve all been cheated on, everybody in here been cheated on, none of us have ever been interviewed by the person that cheated on us on television,” Rock joked. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me.”
To end the show, Rock address the question of why he didn’t fight back saying, “I got parents! Because I was raised! And you know what my parents taught me? Don’t fight in front of white people.”
