CNN
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Chris Rock finally addressed the Oscar slap and made streaming history on Saturday.
“I’m going to try to do a show tonight without offending anyone. I’m going to do my best, because you never know who might be triggered,” Rock said, opening his set from Baltimore. “People always say hurtful words… Whoever says hurtful words is never punched in the face.”
After that quick obvious reference to Will Smith slapping the stage at last year’s Academy Awards, Rock saved his jokes about the incident for the last ten minutes of the show.
“You all know what happened to me, getting killed by Shug Smith,” Rock said. “It still hurts. ‘Summertime’ rang in my ears. But I’m not a victim, baby. You’ll never see me cry on Oprah or Gayle … I took that hit like Pacquiao.
The Rock suggested that Smith’s response to his Oscar joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, was more about their relationship than him.
“I’ve loved Will Smith, all my life,” Rock said. “I’ve rooted for Will Smith my whole life … now I watch ‘Emancipation’ so he can see it.”
Smith plays a slave man in the period drama, “Emancipation”.
“‘You didn’t do anything that night?'” Rock said people have asked him. “Because I got parents. You know what my parents taught me? Don’t fight in front of the whites.”
Rock hit on several topics in the first 50 minutes of the special, including drug addiction, abortion, racism in America, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, the Kardashian family and “awakening.”
“I don’t have a problem with waking up. I have no problem with that. I am all for social justice. I am for giving the marginalized people their rights. What I have a problem with is selective outrage,” Rock said. “You know what I’m talking about. A person does something, he is rejected. Someone else does the same thing, nothing. You know what I’m talking about… the people who play Michael Jackson songs but R. They don’t play the banana. Same offense, one of them has better songs.”
Addressing the country’s division, Rock said, “America is in terrible shape right now.”
“We got it worse than Ukraine. Yes, I said. Do you know why? Because Ukraine is united and America is clearly divided,” Rock joked. “If the Russians just came here, half the country would say, ‘Let’s listen to them.’ We are in a bad place right now.”
Rock also talked about his romantic life, realizing how much women do for men when he noticed his pillowcases were dirty.
“I’m trying to date women my age, who are 10 to 15 years younger than me,” he said. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game. I didn’t get rich and stay in shape to talk about Anita Baker. I’m trying to catch the doja cat.”
“Chris Rock: Selective Outrage” marked the first live global streaming event for Netflix.
The performance was Rock’s sixth standup special and his second for Netflix following 2018’s “Tambourine,” directed by Bo Burnham.
A pre-show event kicked off with comedian Ronnie Chiang live from Los Angeles, where he told the crowd, “We could have done this whole thing in advance and nobody would have cared, but we did it for a good cause. Doing: Finally turn off traditional TV to try and put it out of its misery. In fact, if you listen hard enough you can hear baby boomers canceling the last of their cable subscription packages.
There was also a post-show special with comedians Arsenio Hall, Dana Carvey, David Spade, Yvonne Orji and more.
