Chris Rock Addresses The Slap One Year Later in Live Netflix Special

Chris Rock spent the weekend before the 2023 Oscars joking about the controversial moment at last year's ceremony where Will Smith slapped him onstage over a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.

The comedian's latest stand-up special Selective Outrage premiered on Netflix last night, including his first public comments on the slap. Though Rock has previously joked about the moment while touring, the special marked the first time that the wider public heard his thoughts of the infamous moment.

Rock began his set, which was streamed live Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre, with comments on woke culture and off-hand references to the incident, including one moment where he said, "Anyone who says words hurt has never been punched in the face."

He later directly addressed the slap near the end of the special.

"Everybody f--kin' knows. Yes, it happened, like a year ago, I got smacked at the f--king Oscars by this motherf--ker. People are like, 'Did it hurt? It still hurts! I've got 'Summertime' ringing in my ears," he said with a laugh, referencing Smith's 1991 track.

He then insisted that he's "not a victim," adding "You will never see me on Oprah or Gayle crying. Never gonna happen. I took that hit like Pacquiao, motherf--ker."

Rock later got more personal, saying that the slap was about Smith "practicing selective outrage."

"Everybody knows that had nothing to do with me. I didn't have any entanglements," he said, referring to the cheating rumors surrounding the couple in June 2020.

"His wife was f--king her son's friend. Now, I normally would not talk about this sh-t, But for some reason, these n---as put that shit on the internet," he continued, referencing the Smiths' Red Table Talk special regarding the rumors. "I have no idea why two people that talented would do something that low-down."

"We've all been cheated on, none of us have every been interviewed by the person who cheated on us," he concluded. "Why the f--k would you do that shit? She hurt him way more than I did... Everybody called him a bitch, and who's he hit? Me!"

Rock closed his set by calling back to an earlier Oscars dispute between himself and the couple, recalling how Pinkett-Smith said Rock shouldn't host the Oscars because Smith wasn't nominated for his role in Concussion, amid the "#OscarsSoWhite" backlash in 2016.

"Nobody's picking on this bitch," Rock said. "She started this shit... And then this n---a gives me a concussion!"

"I love Will Smith… he makes great movies. I rooted for Will Smith my whole life. And now, I watched Emancipation just so I could watch him get whooped," he added.

For his final joke, Rock addressed why he didn't fight back. "Because I got parents! Because I was raised!" he said. "And you know what my parents taught me? Don't fight in front of white people!"

In the days following the incident, Smith publicly apologized, and the Academy suspended him from their events for 10 years. Rock has refused to press charges.

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