Chris Rock is finally ready to talk about Will Smith’s Oscar slap
The stand-up comedian, going live with a new Netflix special a week before the Oscars, spent the past year on tour and working out material on the infamous slap.
Chris Rock is poised to hit back on his own terms and his own turf: a stand-up comedy special that will stream live on Netflix a week before the Academy Awards.
Since Will Smith clobbered him at last year’s Oscars in front of their Hollywood peers and about 15 million onlookers on U.S. television, Mr Rock has avoided the forums where celebrities typically go to unburden themselves. No prime-time interview with Oprah. No magazine cover stories. No confiding on Instagram. In short, no milking of the moment.
The only platform Mr Rock went to is the stage he controls. The comic has spent the past year on a nearly non-stop tour of arenas and theatres, where he gradually rolled out a slew of jokes about being assaulted by Mr Smith. Mr Rock is expected to finally go wide with his take on the slap in the Netflix special scheduled for March 4. Upping the stakes, it’s the first live show — starting at 10pm. Eastern time — that the streamer has ever offered to its 231 million global subscribers. That makes Mr Rock a test pilot for new technology on the service and a push into event programming by the company that trained us to binge content on our own schedule.
“Watching live on Netflix is a real change in the construct that we have with our members,” said Robbie Praw, Netflix’s vice president of stand-up and comedy formats. The streamer tapped a performer “on the Mount Rushmore of comedy” to create a mass moment that will prompt reactions from viewers in real time, he said.
The incident that upended the Academy Awards last year is also likely to be joke fodder at the Oscars ceremony on March 12, judging by a recent promo in the style of “Top Gun: Maverick” that spoofed on ABC’s search for an “unflappable and unslappable” host. (Jimmy Kimmel has the job for a third time.)
Along with that telecast, Mr Rock’s special could close the loop on a truly bizarre episode in pop culture, one that turned into a rolling case study in the way unseemly celebrity behaviour gets processed in public.
Mr Smith, who was banned from Oscars events for 10 years, apologised to Mr Rock and others on his social-media accounts and sought atonement during promotional appearances late last year for his movie “Emancipation.”
Mr Rock, by saving his ammunition for Netflix, has set up a rare thing: a stand-up special with a timely hook. How it lands might determine whether he can reframe the incident that, in an instant, revised the story of his four-decade career.
Preparing for the special may have also served another purpose for Mr Rock himself, said fellow stand-up George Wallace. “You ain’t never going to forget that somebody slapped the shit out of you. But laughter is healing for the soul, and that’s what he’s getting up there … and in the long run, he’s also getting paid for it,” said Mr Wallace, who has a bit about how the slap turned him against all Smiths (Granny Smiths, locksmiths, blacksmiths, Smith Brothers Cough Drops and whatnot).
Netflix will capture Mr Rock’s set at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore. The title of the live special, “Selective Outrage,” is a phrase he has riffed on in relation to Mr Smith during recent performances. These shows included bits about the men’s size disparity, his reasons for not retaliating in the moment and what he thinks really triggered the slap.
It’s unclear how much of this material Mr Rock will include in the hour-plus special. At two of his recent shows (a Journal reporter was in the audience for both) this volley of jokes accounted for only about five minutes of the sets, but earned the biggest laughs and cheers from both audiences. Mr Rock linked that material to subjects near (the term “victim”) and far (the dating habits of women of different ages).
Whatever observations he chooses to share in the live stream, don’t bet on them to include introspective gleanings from a therapist’s office.
“Chris is a really sharp commentator. That’s why pundits will refer to and quote things he has said. But that’s not the same thing as him talking about his deepest dark feelings. He’s not like that,” said Noam Dworman, owner of the New York City-based Comedy Cellar, a home field for Mr Rock where he workshops material (including at drop-ins over the past year).
The slap and resulting tsunami of notoriety happened just as Mr Rock was starting one of his busiest touring stretches ever. Before the Oscars he had already announced an eight-month run of performances, called the Ego Death tour, and a handful of co-headlining shows with Kevin Hart. A series of joint performances with Dave Chappelle would follow in December and January.
In logistical terms, the incident at the Oscars didn’t disrupt the schedule Mr Rock had already plotted out, according to people involved with his planning. Since last March, he has performed more than 100 shows, including dates in England, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. His solo shows grossed about $700,000 per night in ticket sales on average, according to data submitted to concert trade publication Pollstar. The last time he spent that much time on the road was in 2017, in the run-up to his debut Netflix special, “Tamborine.”
Last year, Mr Rock was slow to offer his own take on the subject everyone else was talking about. Three nights after the Oscars at a show at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, he told a rowdy crowd that he was sticking to the routine he had planned, adding, “I’m still kind of processing what happened.”
He got into it more in May when his friend was assaulted during a stand-up set. At the Hollywood Bowl, Mr Chappelle got tackled by a man armed with a knife. In the aftermath, Mr Rock emerged on stage and jokingly asked if the attacker was Mr Smith. A couple nights later, he and Mr Chappelle compared their experiences while bantering for an audience at an L.A. comedy club, according to a report from the surprise appearance.
“At least you got smacked by someone of repute,” Mr Chappelle said.
“I got smacked by the softest n — that ever rapped,” Mr Rock replied.
Netflix and Mr Rock committed to doing the live special together in early September, according to people familiar with the situation. The show represents the second of two comedy specials that Mr Rock committed to for Netflix when he signed with the streamer in 2016. That $40 million deal was one of the first contracts Netflix secured with top comedians as the company pushed into stand-up programming, a business previously dominated by HBO and other networks.
Netflix’s live special comes on the heels of the streamer’s first in-person comedy festival last spring. The 11-day Netflix Is a Joke event in Los Angeles featured 336 comedians at 35 venues, including Gabriel Iglesias at Dodger Stadium.
Typical stand-up specials are produced using footage gathered during multiple performances and edited to feature the best joke deliveries and audience reactions. Mr Rock’s live special will be more akin to seeing the comic perform on a given night on tour, where his set varies from show to show. He’ll perform before 13 cameras overseen by director Joel Gallen, a veteran of televised concerts, comedy specials and roasts who also directed Mr Rock’s 2004 HBO special, “Never Scared.”
As for the decision to do “Selective Outrage” right before the Oscars, Netflix’s Mr Praw says the timing amounts to a coincidence.
“It really was a factor of when Chris felt like he was ready and when the technology was ready,” he said. “I know you’re looking for a more fun answer than that, but that’s really what it came down to.”
The Wall Street Journal
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