Will Smith and Chris Rock: The Slap Heard 'Round the World

Source: Public Domain image courtesy Marie-Lan Nguen, “Ludovisi Gaul and his Wife.” Roman copy of an original monument commemorating victory over the Gauls. 220 BCE. Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Altemps.

Full disclosure: This year, like every year, I skipped the Oscars; investing three-and-a-half hours in an infomercial is a price just too high to pay. So, picking up the news the morning after, I felt like one of the show’s hosts, Amy Schumer, who, when she returned to the stage after the notorious incident, asked, “Did I miss anything?”

Looking at the “Most Popular” button on The New York Times page revealed that several news stories about the slap attracted more readers than the invasion of Ukraine, the apparent poisoning of an envoy to peace talks, the pronouncement from a federal judge that a former President had very likely committed felonies, the seeming involvement of a wife of a Supreme Court justice in the prelude to insurrection, and the news that solar and wind power now generates a full 10% of the world’s energy needs. In normal times, any one of these important stories would dominate reporting. Need I point out that we are not in “normal” times?

We’re mesmerized by shock and celebrity, but it is the clash of honor code and play that helps explain a deeper reason that this televised transgression resonated so deeply. First, the play.

Comedy as Disorderly Play

Oscar hosts typically roast the film industry, the audience, and the nominees; these are inside jokes for insiders. When Billy Crystal noticed that the pudgy actor Jonah Hill had trimmed down significantly since appearing in Moneyball, he promised him cupcakes after the show. That was standard schtick. Years later, commenting on the nomination of the movie version of the Broadway production Cats, host Ricki Gervais said it was the “worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.” I can’t repeat, here, a similar joke (offensive in at least three ways by my count, hence its brilliance) that Gervais delivered about one of the film’s actors, James Corden. But it’s noteworthy now that the butt of the joke didn’t bound out of his seat, mount the stage, and sucker-punch the host. Gervais was operating inside a convention that play-theorist Thomas Henricks calls “disorderly play,” and the audience and the actor good-naturedly played and laughed along.

Festive Abuse

The late comedian Don Rickles is so closely associated with standup insult comedy that over seven decades, he earned the moniker “The Merchant of Venom.” During a television appearance with America’s most distinguished comedian, Bob Hope, Rickles said, “We kid about great stars like you, Bob. Why? Because you’re old and washed up.” Razzing a Hollywood couple famous for misbehavior, Rickles quipped, “Eddie Fisher marrying Elizabeth Taylor is like me trying to wash the Empire State Building with a bar of soap.” And to the famously laconic westerns star Clint Eastwood, the city-kid said, “His idea of a good time is sitting on a pickup truck watching his dog bark.”

The Difference Between Disorderly Play and Disorderly Conduct

Chris Rock's brazen comedy is so raw on the near-taboo issues of race, sex, class, religion, politics, and drugs that I struggled in vain to find quips to quote. Profoundly, he said that “comedy is blues for people who can’t sing.” And so, like a blues musician, he regularly channels outrage and disappointment, and to hilarious effect, castigates greed and inequality, hypocrisy and political posturing, and insincerity and betrayal. But he saves his most inspired improv to make fun of pretentiousness and celebrity.

Rock knows that he walks a narrow line to make us laugh; consider his wry observation on the tension between sound opinion and acceptable behavior. “You know they say, ‘There’s no reason to ever hit a woman.’ S#!t! There’s a reason to hit everybody. You just don’t do it. S#!t! There’s a reason to kick an old man down a flight of stairs. You just don’t do it. Ain’t nobody above an ass-whooping.” The sentiment now seems prophetic.

And this brings us to Will Smith, who in righteous anger delivered the notorious smackdown at the Oscars.

Edgy Comedy Meets Wounded Honor

We know the provocation. At the ceremony, Rock tried to deliver a joke, noting that Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, stunning in an emerald gown, might appear in the sequel of GI Jane.

This was an insider’s joke for an audience of insiders. It wasn’t just the gratuity he was after to get the laugh; it was the incongruity. Rock was alluding to the ultra-unglamorous role of a special-ops commando that required Demi Moore to shave her head.

Upon hearing the joke, Pinkett Smith rolled her eyes and sat ramrod straight. It transpires that her bald styling was not entirely a fashion choice at all, but instead due in part to the medical condition alopecia, which causes hair loss. And for her husband, Will Smith, the joke did not just fall flat; it sent him into a rage.

Again, successful humor depends on a kind of unwritten license. James Corden didn’t smack Ricky Gervais for an arguably more insulting joke because the audience had, in effect, agreed beforehand that they were fair targets. (If Corden, whose comedy sense is impeccable, had physically retaliated, we’d probably still be laughing at the YouTube clips.) But Rock and the Smiths had struck no such agreement.

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Will Smith, who is very quick and very funny, might have heckled back, like at a comedy club, winning the day.

Instead, he saw cruelty and followed a more ancient route.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, the late cultural historian, wrote in his fine book Southern Honor, Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, that in traditional societies, mockery that dishonored a mother, wife, or daughter violated brittle male status, and thus mandated fierce retaliation. “So it had been in ancient German and Celtic tribes,” Wyatt-Brown wrote, “and so it continued to be in antebellum society.”

Here, at the most glamorous of modern occasions, we find that history and its psychic currents are still flowing very much in us and around us.