WARNING – This post contains very strong language and the use of racial slurs used on-stage: “Anybody that says words hurt has never been punched in the face,” Chris Rock said with a well-timed figurative wink tonight right at the start of his live Netflix special Selective Outrage.
Starting off with a backstage montage of a Prince pendent wearing Rock heading toward the stage, the special from Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre quickly launched into the comic taking barbed swings at the selective outrage of the woke crowd, “everybody scared and full of shit,” corporate charity, “yoga pants politics,” and “the kind of people who play Michael Jackson songs, but not R.
Kelly.” “Same crime, one has better songs.” As typically skillful and masterfully paced as Rock’s routine was from the get-go and his poignant take on “White Planet of the Apes sh*t” of the January 6 attack of the Capitol, that initial material and the zingers that followed wasn’t truly what the audience, virtual and actual, came for.
They came for Rock’s response to Will Smith. They came to hear what Chris Rock would say about being slapped by Smith at last year’s Oscars after the presenting comic mocked the illness induced bald head of the Best Actor nominee’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
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