High-level Comedy: Chris Rock Counterpunches Will Smith and Fake Victims
High-level Comedy: Chris Rock Counterpunches Will Smith and Fake Victims
In his new Netflix special, the comedy titan gives Americans what we want and need
Chris Rock and Netflix knew exactly what they were doing when they scheduled his live show “Selective Outrage” to air a week before the Academy Awards. Audiences had waited almost a year for a proper counterpunch to The Slap. We would finally get to see how Rock would unload on Will Smith, and we’d talk about it during the lead-up to Sunday’s Oscars.
During his special, Rock addresses that infamous blow with the same framework he uses to explore what he calls America’s biggest addiction—not opioids, but attention. Along the way, Rock shows why he remains elite, and not just at making people laugh.
Rock outlines various ways to attract attention.
Show your ass.
Be infamous. (“Shoot up a school, trying to stab Dave Chappelle at a show.”)
Be excellent.
He points to the excellence of tennis star Serena Williams, and offers a qualifier, “But it's hard being excellent. You got to get up in the morning. You got to work out. You got to practice.”
So he suggests another, easier way to attract attention.
Number four is to be a victim (crowd: ooh!). You like, where he going with this? (laughter).
Don't get me wrong, there's no victim shaming going on. No, no, no, no, no, no, there are real victims in this world. There are people that have gone through unspeakable trauma, and they need our love and they need our support and they need our care.
But if everybody claims to be a victim, when the real victims need help, ain’t nobody gonna be there to help them. And right now we live in a world where the emergency room is filled up with motherfuckers with paper cuts. (guarded laughter, applause)
Rock says everybody’s trying to be a victim, even when they know they’re not.
Like white men. When did white men become victims? White men actually think they losing the country. To who? It ain’t us [...]
Did you see the Capitol riots? White men trying to overthrow the government—that they run … Like, what kind of white Planet of the Apes shit was that?
Most people can’t make strangers laugh. If you’re good at that, you’ll be a good comedian. If you can make strangers laugh, and make them think you’ll ascend to a level that few comedians reach. If you can make politically diverse audiences laugh and think, you have made it to a level that Rock and few others have reached.
Like so much else these days, even comedy is divided between Team Red and Team Blue. That’s one finding from “Are You What You Watch?” a report produced by USC’s Media Impact Project, which examines viewing trends for the decade spanning from 2008 to 2018.
If you’re on the Blues, you probably dig “The Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live.” If you’re on the Reds, you probably don’t like those shows, at least not today.
Among late-night shows, “Saturday Night Live” now ranks highest among Blues and lowest among Reds. The reverse was true in 2008.
NBC’s “The Tonight Show” switched hosts from Jay Leno to Jimmy Fallon, and we found a big shift in the ideological makeup of its audience. In 2018, Blues are most likely to rank it among their favorites and Reds are the least likely to do so. The reverse was true in 2008.
Although I can’t be sure, it does seem like both shows have moved from the “equal opportunity offender” approach, championed by the likes of Jay Leno, to being exercises in confirmation bias.
Rock doesn’t bask in “Our Team Good, Their Team Bad!” clapter. What makes him uniquely talented is that he commands almost everyone’s attention. He steers the audience toward danger, then toward comfort, then toward an idiosyncratic point of view. And at the end, everybody’s laughing.
Rock understands the state of the culture, and when to follow a potentially problematic statement with a comforting disclaimer. When he reveals his fourth way to get attention—be a victim—the audience “ooohs,” but his disclaimer provides comforting context as he distinguishes between actual victims (who deserve our compassion) and fakers. His “papercuts” line elicits, not a thunderous response, but guarded laughter followed by pensive applause.
His first fakers are “white men” and the “Capitol rioters,” and he knows he can barrel forward without building sympathy for those groups. Eventually, he includes Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, among the fakers. He offers a little softening, “she seemed like a nice lady,” before needling her for running to Oprah and playing the victim.
An especially poignant moment comes when Rock compares his daughter’s charmed life to his mother’s childhood. He explains how the law prevented his mother, born in South Carolina in 1945, from visiting a white dentist. With no black dentists nearby, his mother had no choice but to get her tooth pulled by a veterinarian.
I'm not talking about Harriet Tubman! (laughter) I'm talking about my mother! […]
Think about this—the same woman that had to go through the indignity of getting her teeth taken out by a fucking vet—the same woman now, twice a year, gets on a plane flies to Paris, and has coffee with her granddaughter who is going to culinary school.
With one anecdote, Rock speaks to two different groups of Americans: those who pooh pooh post-slavery discrimination and those slow to celebrate progress.
We all knew Rock would end with his Will Smith material, and as he segues into his final bit he reflects on the post-slap fallout.
People ask me if it hurt. It still hurts. I got “Summertime” ringing in my ears, but I am not a victim! You will not see me on Oprah crying.
For the past year, Rock received heaps of attention for being involved in an infamous public moment. But he didn’t choose to be infamous.
He could have headed to Oprah’s couch and whipped up more attention for himself, but he refused to be a victim.
He says he doesn’t even take his shirt off on camera, so it’s unlikely he’ll be showing his ass for attention.
That leaves only one option. Chris Rock will continue to attract attention by being excellent.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes “Little Pink House”starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn,” “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.