Chris Rock Roasts Will Smith During Stand Up Netflix Show: "I Got ‘Summertime’ Ringing in my ears"
Chris Rock is going all out on Oscar winner Will Smith after almost a year of the infamous Slapgate incident during the 94th Academy Awards. On his latest Netflix show, Selective Outrage, the comedian did not mince his words when it came to expressing his anger over the embarrassing moment on stage while hosting the star-studded Oscar night last year. “You all know what happened to me, getting smacked by Suge Smith. Everybody knows. Everybody f---ing knows,” Rock 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.”
Rock has chosen the more open platform of his stand-up show to discuss the incident, rather than opting for talk shows to speak about it. “I’m not a victim baby. You will never see me on Oprah or Gayle [King] crying. You will never see it…It’s never going to happen. F--k that s--t, I took that s--t like [Manny] Pacquiao.” These words come a year after Will Smith slapped the comedian at the Oscars for a joke he perceived as going too far. Will Smith later released an apology, saying that his behavior was "unacceptable" and that he was "deeply remorseful" about it, as reported by the Guardian.
According to Variety, the title of Chris Rock's show was inspired by the Slapgate incident. Rock revealed, “Will Smith practices 'Selective Outrage'. Everybody who really knows, knows I had nothing to do with that s--t. I didn’t have any ‘entanglements.'”
He also went on to speak about the events that led up to the main fiasco on stage during the Oscars in 2022. Speaking about Jada Pinkett Smiths' Red Table Talk episode where Jada admitted to having an affair with another man, he said, “We’ve all been cheated on. Everybody in here has been cheated on. None of us has ever been interviewed by the person that cheated on us… on television. She hurt him way more than he hurt me.”
Chris revealed he reached out to Will sympathetically after the particular episode was aired to console him, but Will shut him out and targeted him on the Oscar stage. “I tried to call that man and give him my condolences. He didn’t pick up for me.” The comedian then went on to list off all the people in Hollywood who called Smith a “b---h” after the Red Table Talk episode, including “The View,” “The Talk,” “The Breakfast Club,” “Drink Champs” and so on. “Everybody called him a b---h and who does he hit? Me.”
He also went back in time to explain that the bad blood between him and the Smiths started during the 2016 Oscars. That year, Pinkett Smith had called for a boycott due to the lack of diversity in nominations. Chris said that she had asked him to quit because her husband hasn't been nominated for Concussion, prompting him to crack some jokes about it: "So then I do some jokes about it. Who gives a f--k? That’s how it is. She started it. I finished it."
However Chris did not let his admiration for Will Smith stand neglected while also calling him out, "I love Will Smith, my whole life…he makes great movies. I have rooted for Will Smith my whole life.” Rock said. “And now I watch Emancipation just to see him get whooped.”
Selective Outrage aired on March 4. Chris dressed in an all-white outfit touched on a range of woke topics on the show, including “the biggest addiction in America,” abortion, Beyoncé, the Kardashians, and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. Broadcasting live from Baltimore at the Hippodrome Theatre, Rock’s live stream was one of his biggest public performances since last year’s Oscars scandal.
