LOS ANGELES — When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars ceremony, many members of the live audience and TV viewers at home thought it was a joke — until they realized, to their horror, that it wasn’t.
After making little comment about the incident during his concert tour last year, and turning down numerous interview requests, Rock finally hit back on Saturday with a flurry of brutal jabs at Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, bringing up allegations of infidelity in their marriage and describing his Oscar-winning foe repeatedly as a “b—.” The comedic slapback came during Rock’s Netflix special “Selective Outrage,” broadcast live globally from Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre.
“You never know who might get triggered,” Rock, dressed in an all-white outfit, joked in a (thinly) veiled allusion to the slap in his set’s opening moments, promising a show that would offend nobody. “Anybody who says ‘Words hurt’ has never been punched in the face.”
