Even though it came at the end of a deliberately provocative hourlong routine, it was still jarring to hear comedian Chris Rock refer to Jada Pinkett-Smith as “this b—-” Saturday night, a year after he joked about her shaved head at the Oscars and her husband, Will Smith, walked onto the stage and slapped him.
Rock’s promise not to talk about Pinkett-Smith proved as false as his promise “to try to do a show tonight without offending nobody.”
“Keep my wife’s name out of your f—— mouth!” Smith yelled then, and Rock, rather obediently, said, “I’m going to.”
But Rock’s promise not to talk about Pinkett-Smith proved as false as his promise at the start of his Netflix special “Selective Outrage”: that “I’m going to try to do a show tonight without offending nobody.” Perhaps more than he ever has, he tested the audience’s tolerance. For example, in declaring himself pro-choice, Rock over and over again referred to abortion as “killing babies” and said “women should have a right to kill a baby until it’s 4 years old.”
Well after he made his audience squirm with those words, he attacked what he called the couple’s addiction to attention and Smith’s “selective outrage.” He used the b-word to describe both husband and wife, actually, but his derisive language felt in bounds for Smith in ways but out of bounds for Pinkett-Smith.
The crowd seemed to draw in its breath when Rock, disputing the claim that he’d had a history of singling out Pinkett-Smith for ridicule, said “Nobody’s picking on this b——” and argued to the extent that there was something between them, she started it. It felt so deeply personal because it wasn’t said to get a laugh and because it felt like he was deliberately taunting her husband by disrespecting her.
People close to Rock said after last year’s Oscars that he didn’t know Pinkett-Smith’s short hair was a result of alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss, and…
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