Chris Rock has finally had his full - and very brutal - say on Will Smith a year on from the infamous Oscars ceremony slap.
After months of keeping quiet, Chris used the shocking incident as the main source for his new comedy material which dropped on Netflix overnight.
Will, 54, made global headlines and faced widespread criticism after storming the Academy Awards stage and slapping 58-year-old Chris over a joke made at the expense of his wife Jada Pinkett Smith .
While he continued to pick up his Best Actor gong at the bash, the actor later resigned from the Academy and has been banned from attending for 10 years.
A year on from the scandal, Chris has opened up about the infamous incident and finally addressed what happened in his live Netflix special, Selective Outrage, which was streamed live on Netflix from the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore on Saturday night.
The 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."
An hour into the show, Chris finally 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.”
The comic then went on to tell how the incident had inspired the title of his new show.
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 shit. I didn’t have any ‘entanglements.'”
He clarified the reference to the ‘Red Table Talk’ episode where Will appeared with his wife Jada and she disclosed her affair with rapper August Alsina, for anyone not in-the-know.
“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.”
In a mic drop moment, Rock ended the special by addressing why he chose not to fight back.
"I got parents! Because I was raised!" Rock said. "And you know what my parents taught me? Don't fight in front of white people."
Elsewhere in his live set Rock, who appeared on stage dressed in all white and wearing a Prince necklace, talked about woke culture.
Rock said he was for “wokeness” and supporting marginalized communities, but he’s tired of “selective outrage.”
“They say, ‘words hurt.'” Rock joked. “You gotta watch what you say because ‘words hurt.’ Anybody who says ‘words hurt’ has never been punched in the face. Words hurt when you write them on a brick.”
Chris then clarified exactly who he was addressing: “The kind of people who play Michael Jackson songs but won’t play R. Kelly. Same crime, one of them just got better songs.”
He went on to tell jokes about attention being “the biggest addiction in America,” abortion, Beyoncé, the Kardashians and even Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
Chris questioned Markle’s shock during her Oprah interview and took aim at the royals. “You didn’t google these mother**kers?” he asked.
“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.”
The livestream was Rock’s biggest public performance since the Oscars scandal and the first time he has addressed the incident at length, despite having been on a world tour in the year between the slap and now.
In the days following the slap, Smith apologised for his actions, writing on Instagram : “I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.”
In the months that followed, Smith posted another apology, this time on camera, where he revealed that he had reached out to Rock.
“The message that came back is he’s not ready to talk, and when he is, he will reach out,” Smith said.
