In his first post-Oscars standup set, Chris Rock barely acknowledged The Slap. “I’m still kind of processing what happened. So, at some point I’ll talk about that sh*t. And it will be serious and funny,” he explained before ignoring the crowd’s chant of “f*ck Will Smith” (he had no such patience during the following show).
Amy Schumer, who co-hosted the 2022 Oscars, had a little more time to incorporate Will Smith slapping Chris Rock (it’s crazy how quickly that’s become a normal thing to type/read) into her set. But as she told the sold-out house at Las Vegas’ Mirage Theater over the weekend in her first stand-up show since the incident, “I don’t even know what to say about the Oscars… I have no jokes about it. All I can say is that I don’t know if you saw this but Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. Did you read that in your news feed?”
The Life & Beth star said that she was “kind of feeling myself… and then all of a sudden Ali was making his way up,” a reference to the 2001 film Ali, where Smith was nominated for an Academy Award for playing boxer Muhammad Ali. (In an unintentionally amusing coincidence, he lost that year to Training Day star Denzel Washington, who was one of the first people to speak to — and pray with — Smith following the slap.)
Schumer continued, “And it was just a f*cking bummer. All I can say is that it was really sad, and I think it says so much about toxic masculinity. It was really upsetting, but I think the best way to comfort ourselves would be for me to say the Oscar jokes that I wasn’t allowed to say on TV.” Schumer then proceeded to do so, against her lawyer’s wishes (there’s a really dark one about Alec Baldwin).
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)
