The Will Smith slap and the tortured face of comedy

We overcomplicate so many things these days. Often what we see with our own eyes is thrust into a morass of sermonising. Worse, humour has become tormented with the judge of what’s funny or not subject to almost algebraic moral complexity.

We wouldn’t know it if we delved deep into the interminable chatter in its wake, but Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock is a straightforward matter.

Will Smith stands 188 centimetres and weighs maybe 90 kgs. Maybe more. Chris Rock is 178 cm and I’m guessing around 75 kgs.

When Smith’s slap came, he was punching down three weight divisions. Heavyweights, even cruiserweights don’t face off against welterweights for very good reasons. In terms of height, weight and reach, it’s not a fair fight.

Will Smith and The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. Now that’s a fair fight and one that with a bit of foresight could have been arranged. The Rock was in the house after all.

Former pro-wrestler, actor and author, Mick ‘Mankind’ Foley tweeted, “If it was The Rock instead of Chris Rock making the same GI Jane reference, there’s no slap. The vessel of love is a bully.”

If it was @TheRock instead of @chrisrock making the same #GIJane reference, there’s no slap.

The vessel of a love is a bully.

— Mick Foley (@RealMickFoley) March 28, 2022

Can you smell what The Rock’s cookin’, Will?

Fantasy bouts aside, that should have been the end of the pondering. A big man assailed a small one. He did so in a manner of a surprise attack. Chris Rock had no opportunity to defend himself. Yes, it was only an open-handed slap but it constitutes an assault in any jurisdiction you can think of, including Los Angeles County.

Afterwards, in the manner of a triumphant pub brawler, Smith yelled obscenities at Rock. “Keep my wife’s name out of your f***in’ mouth.”

According to reports, the Academy ruminated on what to do next. In the 45 minutes between the assault and Smith receiving his award for Best Actor, serious consideration was given to removing Smith from the Dolby Theatre, but the Academy decided, as it generally does, not to decide.

Let’s put it this way, if this had happened in any workplace other than that of Hollywood movie folk, that is precisely what would have happened.

But Smith was allowed to stay and went on to receive his award, be humbled by a standing ovation from the majority of those present and make a tearful speech where he apologised to everyone except Chris Rock.

Later, Smith was filmed at the Gold afterparty on the dance floor, beaming and having a wonderful time. It was hardly the behaviour of a man stricken by remorse.

Chris Rock hasn’t made a public utterance since. All we know is he decided not to press charges.

The morning after, Smith made an Instagram apology, a carefully worded public relations confection drafted and redrafted to within an inch of its life. It had all the sincerity of a politician’s back handed mea culpa with a little Hollywood narcissism thrown in for good measure.

The Academy has announced it had “officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law.”

Slaughtering a goat to fiddle about with the entrails by means of prognostication would be a waste of a damned fine goat. The Academy’s statement is a polite way of saying it will do next to nothing. Wrist slaps all around. Smith will keep his award.

Post slap what was intriguing, and I guess, entirely predictable was that the media went into a twisted moral hyperdrive. The behaviour of a schoolyard bully became enmeshed in race and gender politics, Hollywood-style.

The Guardian’s Tayo Bero, gushed about “white outrage”. Smith, she wrote, was “being held up to much stricter standards than white men who have behaved just as badly as black men or even worse …” and went on to reference a little known and uncorroborated account of John Wayne being restrained by security guards from rushing the stage when a Native American woman and actress, Sacheen Littlefeather, made a speech on behalf on Marlon Brando at the Oscars in 1973. Brando won the best actor award for his role in Godfather, and through Littlefeather, refused to accept the gold statue.

All we would be able to conclude from that anecdote was that security was a whole lot better back then.

An ABC think piece implied Rock and Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith had form. Perhaps Rock’s gibe at this year’s Oscars had its genesis six years ago when Rock joked at Smith and Pinkett Smith’s decision to boycott the Oscars as part of the hashtag Oscars So White movement.

“Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited,” Rock quipped in his opening monologue in 2016. Ouch.

Other commentators clutched pearls and moaned about Rock’s 2022 GI Jane joke, noting Pinkett Smith’s battle with alopecia. The joke, the haughty op-eds concluded, wasn’t funny because Rock had mocked a black woman’s disability.

Will Smith attends the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.

Maybe it was funny, maybe it wasn’t. Humour is subjective. But laughter is instinctive.

It’s worth remembering Chris Rock was one of several big-name comedians who decided to shun college audiences because they were, according to Rock, “way too conservative.”

“Not like they’re voting Republican,” the comedian said in a 2015 interview in Vulture, “but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody.”

“’We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose,’” Rock said. “Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say ‘the black kid over there’. No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Rather than a straightforward scoreboard of what’s funny and what’s not based on the volume of laughter, what we are being asked to do is perform complex mathematical equations in our heads, like Russell Crowe’s Professor John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, before we are free to laugh. Every cultural, racial and gender permutation must be laid bare, every conceivable offence that might be taken weighed up before we can either a) laugh uncontrollably, b) titter awkwardly, or c) howl in outrage.

Thus, the much larger and sadder message from a regrettable though relatively minor incident veered into the vexed business of how humour is subject to so many rules, so many prejudices and so much moral pondering that, if left to fester, would reduce a comedian’s set to a breezy ‘Hello’ followed by a perplexed, “Is this thing on?”