From taking aim at Meghan Markle and the Kardashians to savage digs at Will Smith over the Oscars slap, Chris Rock has made a series of bombshell swipes in his much-anticipated Netflix comedy special.
The 58-year-old took to the stage on Saturday night to perform his new comedy special, Selective Outrage, which was filmed in front of a live audience at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore.
It was the streaming giant’s first real-time broadcast, airing at 3am UK time.
The livestream was Rock’s biggest performance since last year’s Oscars scandal in which Will Smith stormed the Academy Awards stage and slapped Chris over a joke made at the expense of his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
The comedy show tackled a wide range of issues, including woke culture, Meghan Markle and Will's wife Jada's 'entanglements'.
"I'm going to try to do the show without offending anyone," Rock said at the start, in a nod to the Smith altercation. "Because you never know who might get triggered."
But Rock didn’t just save his digs for Smith, who’s slap he spoke at length about for the first time, as he reserved some shots for other A-Listers.
We’ve taken a look at the seven biggest bombshells from Chris Rock: Selective Outrage here…
Will Smith Oscars Slap
After months of keeping quiet, Chris used the shocking incident as the main source for his new comedy material.
An hour into the show, Chris got to the juicy bit and got stuck into making digs at Oscar-winning Will in a section of new material fans have been waiting for as he spoke at length about the slap for the first time.
“You all know what happened to me, getting smacked by Suge Smith. Everybody knows. Everybody f**king knows,” Rock said. “I got smacked like a year ago… and people are like, ‘Did it hurt?’ It still hurts. I got ‘Summertime’ ringing in my ears.”
Rock was very direct over how much pain the slap caused him and didn’t mince his words, pointing out how much bigger Will is compared to him.
“Will Smith is significantly bigger than me, we are not the same size. Will Smith does movies with his shirt off. You’ve never seen me do a movie with my shirt off.
“If I’m in a movie getting open heart surgery, I got on a sweater. Will Smith played Muhammad Ali in a movie, you think I auditioned for that part? I played Pookie in ‘New Jack City.’ I played a piece of corn in ‘Pootie Tang’. Even in animation this mother***ker’s bigger. I’m a zebra, he’s a shark.”
Although there’s been pressure for Chris to open up about the incident on a talk show, he was adamant he wasn’t going to buckle to it.
“I’m not a victim baby, you will never see me on Oprah or Gayle [King] crying. You will never see it… It’s never going to happen. F**k that shit, I took that shit like [Manny] Pacquiao.”
Jada Pinkett Smith’s Entanglement
As he got stuck into roasting Smith, Rock insisted that the root of the King Richard star’s anger and subsequent infamous Oscars slap was really nothing to do with him.
The comic told how the incident had actually inspired the title of his new show, Selective Outrage.
Taking a savage swipe at Will, Chris took aim and blasted: “Will Smith practices ‘Selective Outrage,'” Rock explained. “Everybody who really knows, knows I had nothing to do with that sh*t. I didn’t have any ‘entanglements.'”
For anyone not in-the-know, he clarified the reference to the ‘Red Table Talk’ episode where Will appeared with his wife Jada Pinkett Smith and she disclosed her 2015 affair with rapper August Alsina – a friend of her son Jaden.
“His wife was f**king her son’s friend. I normally would not talk about this s**t… I have no idea why two talented people would do something that f**king lowdown.
“We’ve all been cheated on, everybody in here been cheated on. None of us has ever been interviewed by the person that cheated on us, on television… She hurt him way more than he hurt me.”
He went on to say that after the interview, “everybody in the world called him a b*tch”.
He continued: “I tried to call the mother**ker, I tried to call that man and give him my condolences, he didn’t pick up for me.”
Rock then listed all the people in Hollywood who had called him a “b*tch”, including The View, The Talk, The Breakfast Club and Drink Champs.
Rock said: “Everybody called him a b*tch and who’s he hit? Me,” he said to laughter from the audience.
“I loved Will Smith, my whole life I loved him,” he went on. “I saw him open for Run DMC … he has made some great movies. I have rooted for Will Smith my whole life. And now I watch Emancipation just to see him get whooped.”
Meghan Markle
While a whole ten minutes was devoted to the Oscars scandal, Rock tore into other targets for the first hour.
He took aim at Meghan Markle, berating her for her claims that the royal family were racist in an interview she did with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.
The former actress had told Oprah how she felt isolated from The Firm and shared a story about how one senior member of the family raised “concerns” over “how dark” her and Prince Harry ’s baby’s skin would be before she had Archie.
But Rock took aim at Meghan in his new show, dismissing her claims and telling how he thought she was just merely dealing with internal family drama, “in-law sh*t”.
“Like who is this girl Meghan Markle ?” he started, adding: “Seems like a nice lady – just complaining. Like didn’t she hit the light-skinned lottery?”
He made fun of her further, mocking Meghan saying: “They’re so racist, they’re so racist.”
Rock added: “Some of that s*** she went through was not racism; it was just some in-law s***.
“Sometimes, it’s just some in-law s*** because she’s complaining, I’m like ‘What the f*** is she talking about?’”
Rock mocked Meghan again by repeating her claims: “’Oprah, they’re so racist they wanted to know how brown the baby was going to be’ – I’m like, ‘That’s not racist, because even Black people want to know how brown the baby going to be.’”
Rock also professed he knew what Markle was “going through”, stating: “I know her dilemma: Black girl trying to be accepted by her white in-laws. Oh, it’s hard. It’s so hard, it’s very hard– but it ain’t as hard as a white girl trying to be accepted by her Black in-laws. Now that s**t is really hard.”
He then quipped: “Meghan Markle, I know the dilemma. I’m like, ‘If you black and you wanted to be accepted by your white in-laws then you need to marry a Kardashian because they accept everybody.’”
Royal family
Rock didn’t just save his best quips for the Duchess of Sussex as he also took aim at the royal family themselves.
Chris questioned Markle’s shock at the alleged skin-colour comments made by “senior royals” during her Oprah interview.
Berating The Firm, Rock asked: “You didn’t google these mother***kers?”
“What the f**k is she talking about she didn’t know? It’s the royal family. They’re the original racists.
“They invented colonialism. They are the OG’s of racism. They’re the Sugarhill Gang of racism.”
He went on: “That’s like marrying into the Budweiser family and going, ‘They drink a lot.’”
At an engagement the day after the Oprah interview aired, Prince William was asked if the royal family was a racist family, to which he replied: "We’re very much not a racist family."
‘Selective Outrage’
Rock’s cleverest material and most savage swipes came from his dissection of what he called “selective outrage,” which he described as a “woke” societal tendency to pick and choose who to cancel for committing similar acts.
“One person does something, they get cancelled. Another person does the exact same thing, nothing,” he said.
He was enraged by “the kind of people who play Michael Jackson songs but won’t play R. Kelly. Same crime — one of ‘em’s just got better songs.”
Wokeness
Following on with the woke theme, Rock also took aim at corporate brands.
He told the live audience how he was fed up of them taking empty stances on major issues to score wokeness points.
“Not only is everybody full of sh*t, every business is full of sh*t,” he began. “They don’t even tell you about the product no more, they just tell you how much charity they do.”
The comic recalled seeing a sign at the athleisure clothing store Lululemon decrying racism, sexism, discrimination and hatred.
“Who gives a f**k?,” he said. “You’re just selling yoga pants! I don’t need your yoga pants politics. Tell me how you work on ball sweat.”
He went on to slam a Subaru advert that promised to donate to charity with every car purchase, when Rock suggested they just give him the car at a cheaper price.
After a digression onto the ‘unwoke’ Elon Musk, Rock came back for Lululemon, blasting: “They sell $100 yoga pants. $100 yoga pants!”
“They hate somebody. They hate the poor,” he slammed as the audience erupted with laughter.
“No, no correction, they don’t sell $100 yoga pants. They sell $100 non-racist yoga pants.”
White men ‘victims’
Earlier in the evening he said that one of the things Americans are addicted to is attention, and he talked about social media and the hunt for cheap likes.
He explained how attention can be easily obtained through various means, including infamy and excellence, but the other means is victimhood.
“There are people in this world who have gone through unspeakable trauma, they need your love, they need your support, they need your care,” Rock clarified.
“But if everybody claims to be a victim, when the real victims need help, ain’t nobody going to be there to help them. And right now, we live in a world where the emergency room is filled up with mother***kers with papercuts.”
Rock then cleverly turned the bit into a rant slamming the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riots, where a deadly insurrection overtook the US Capitol after Donald Trump demanded the general election be overturned.
Trump was furious he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 baselessly claiming the White House had been “stolen” from him.
He urged his MAGA followers to march on the Capitol that then broke out in violence.
“Everybody’s trying to be a victim,” he exclaimed. “People who know good and god damn well they ain’t a victim, like white men.
“When did white men become victims? White men actually think they’re losing their country. To who? It ain’t us. When’s the last time you got on a black cruise ship? Or flew on a black airline?”
He went on: “White men actually think they’re losing the country. Did you see the Capitol Riots? White men trying to overthrow the government that they run!” Rock said. “They’re like, ‘Damn, we gotta get them out of office.’ Who? ‘Us’.”
“Did you see the Capitol riots? What kind of white ‘Planet of the Apes’ s**t was that?”
He then dived into why some white men felt they were being edged out of power, and joked whether commercials featuring mixed race couples were part of the reason.
“There’s no Black couples either,” he said. “Every commercial has a mixed-race couple,” adding that he “saw a commercial the other day where a Japanese woman was married to a caterpillar.”
