A year after receiving a slap from Will Smith during the Oscars, American comedian Chris Rock took his revenge on Saturday, in a monologue broadcast on Netflix. In March 2022, Smith took the Oscars stage to hit the comedian after a joke he made about the short hair of the woman, the Hollywood star, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from alopecia
A few minutes later, Smith received the Oscar for Best Actor for “The Williams Method.” He later apologized to Rock, but he was banned from the Oscars (which are held on March 12 this year) for a decade. The comedian did not file any lawsuits and had been mostly silent about the incident until now.
But this Saturday at a show in Baltimore, Rock shot back by accusing Smith of conducting “selective outrage,” saying the actor was upset that his wife had cheated on him. “Will Smith practices selective outrage,” Rock said in the monologue broadcast live on Netflix. “People ask me ‘did it hurt?’ It still hurts,” he added. “Will Smith is quite a bit bigger than me. Will Smith played Muhammad Ali in a movie. Do you think I auditioned for that role?”
The comedian also explained that Smith had been teased after a podcast episode of his wife, in which the couple discussed the affair and how it had affected him. “Why did he do that?” The comedian wondered, insisting that after that podcast Smith was insulted and his wife was treated as a “bitch” and “predator.”
He added that he had tried to offer his condolences to Smith after that infidelity became public. Rock noted that Pinkett Smith’s animosity toward him had originated a few years earlier, when she asked him to boycott the Oscars because her husband had not been nominated for the 2015 film “Concussion.”
“She said that a grown man should quit his job because the husband wasn’t nominated for ‘Concussion.’ Then (Smith) smacks me,” she joked. “What the hell? Did I make some jokes about it? Who gives a fuck? So are the things; she starts, I finish it. No one was bothering her.”
Rock said that, before the slap, he had always loved Smith, first as a rapper and then as an actor. “He made some great movies. I have supported Will Smith all my life”, but now he said he supported the slave master who beats up Smith’s character in his latest film, “To Freedom” (Emancipation)
