I was wondering how Netflix was going to cue up to the event, and they did so with a moderately amusing pre-show with a running clock counting down to Rock’s appearance on stage. Ronny Chieng MC’d and guest spots (Arsenio Hall, JB Smoove, Leslie Jones, and David Spade and Dana Carvey, the last two must have been pulled out of mothballs) were in abundance. It was all fine, but everyone with eyeballs looking at the screen was waiting for the main event.
Stand up comedy is always a high wire act whether it’s performed in a huge auditorium or a dingy little club, but going all the way live on Netflix, with no pre-recordings? Lunacy. But that’s just what Chris Rock did last night at 10 PM EST, and when he hit the stage dressed in all white with a Prince symbol chain around his neck, he promptly delivered his best stand-up special since his game-changing Bring the Pain over a quarter of a century ago (my how time flies).
It’s unusual for a comedy special to come with such a sense of high drama, but that’s what Selective Outrage brought to the table. Not just because it was fully live, but also because it’s been almost a full year since the slap seen ‘round the world at last year’s Oscars. While Rock has been touring since then (and presumably working on the material for Selective Outrage), he has made nothing close to a definitive public statement on the matter.
That changed last night.
Rock never referenced the incident at the Academy Awards directly, but there were early hints of where Rock was headed. Such as when he said, “Anyone who says words hurt has never been punched in the face.”
The clear theme of the night was not Will Smith though. Instead, Rock took aim at a culture where fame and infamy are practically one and the same, where our desire for protection has made us soft, and where people can be canceled for simply saying the wrong thing. Those are all heavy and current topics that cut deep, especially when coming from a comedian as sharp and driven as Rock.
What is particularly fascinating about Rock’s performance is how hungry he looked on stage. Chris Rock is now 57 years old, and has reached a level of status that even a slide into mediocrity would likely not hurt his marketability. But Rock looked a lot like he did when he was 30 last night—prowling the stage just as he did as a younger man, and speaking fearlessly to the audience in the auditorium as well as the one on their couches.
And believe you, me, there was something to offend everyone who might have been watching. Selective Outrage is no “safe space.” Rock takes the public (and likely quite a few watchers) to task over what we choose to keep and toss away. His commentary on how fans can listen to Michael Jackson, but not R. Kelly is particularly stinging. As Rock puts it, “Same crime, just one guy has better songs.”
His jabs at the inconsistency of wokeness probably hit a peak when Rock points out that we are all “typing out woke-ass tweets on a phone made by a child slave.” He also fileted the notion of corporate virtue, as he took to task Lululemon (a company whose name probably dramatically shot up the search charts on Google last night) for selling $100 yoga pants while showcasing “against racism” signs in their store windows. As Rock makes it clear, they care much more about overpriced exercise wear and looking woke, as opposed to being woke. To Rock, it’s all a con.
I can’t even characterize what he said about Elon Musk without getting into trouble with my editor. As Rock states mid-show, “You can’t tell none of these jokes at work.” He’s not kidding, and, well, I’m at work, so you’ll just have to see it for yourself. That being said, if Rock were merely vulgar (which he is, and spectacularly so), he’d have faded out by now. It’s his incisive look at our culture and times that makes him not only funny and relevant, but also important.
We live at a time when far too many of us unnaturally crave attention, which Rock calls “our biggest addiction.” We are all “feenin’ for likes,” Rock says. It’s awfully hard to argue with him, especially when I check on the hits my articles receive about five times a day.
Of course, politics are in play as well. Rock wonders who the Capitol rioters were railing against, considering that most of them were white and male, and the country they profess to live is hardly slipping away from them. As Rock hilariously states, they were “trying to overthrow the government they run.”
There are also plenty of jokes at the expense of celebrities too. Meghan Markle, Snoop, Jay-Z and Beyoncé all end up taking a skewer or two, although Rock is quick to point out his affection for Snoop and Jay-Z because “The last thing I need is another mad rapper”—one of the few references (however indirect) to Will Smith until the show’s final moments.
The key to name-checking real people in your jokes is not punching down, which Rock never does here (although his hysterical rant on the Kardashians comes close). It also helps that Rock is willing to take him and his own family members to task. He reveals his flaws as a husband and as a father. At one point Rock reveals that he forced a dean to kick his daughter out of her fancy high school so she could learn that there are consequences to sneaking out in the middle of the night on a field trip. He then declares that he has never told his ex-wife or his daughter that fact, but they might just learn about it on Netflix. I’m guessing there may be a couple of uncomfortable conversations in his future.
From there Rock delves into the battle of the sexes, dating in your fifties, and how human beings create the worst offspring of any other animal because it takes 18 years to raise them. All of it is very funny, and if Rock had never mentioned Will Smith at all it still would have been a brilliant performance.
Rock does go there though, and when he does, the knives are out and sharpened. In answering the question of whether or not the slap hurt, Rock says “Did it hurt? It still hurts!” With that declaration out of the way, what follows in the show’s last ten minutes is a complete excoriation of Smith and Pinkett. You can feel the tension building in Rock down the last of the straightaway—the jokes get harsher and more ragged (he even flubs a punchline before quickly correcting himself), and you can feel the anger of a man who has spent the last year of his life trying not to answer questions about getting slapped in front of tens of millions of people across the world. The jokes are still brutally funny, but the emphasis is on the brutally.
There is real hurt in his voice when he speaks of how he always rooted for Will Smith, so much that he even praises Smith’s musical career, which to my mind hasn’t aged well at all. One thing Rock makes clear is that he is not a victim, and that Pinkett (through a very public affair she had with her son’s 20-year-old friend) hurt Smith way more than Smith hurt him. If you were among those waiting for Rock to take some form of revenge against Smith, well, tonight was definitely your night. In making Smith the poster boy for selective outrage, Rock took something back that I believe Smith has taken from him over the last year—a piece of his dignity.
As he delivers his final joke of the night (complete with a well-earned mic drop), we see Rock’s appreciation for the audience and theirs for him. As Rock takes his final look at the full auditorium in front of him, you can see his eyes well up and his expression change.
Rock may not be a victim, but he has been carrying extra weight for nearly a year now. Last night, he set it down, and the sense of relief was palpable. The only stand-up show I’ve seen that ended with such open emotion is Richard Pryor’s Live on the Sunset Strip, filmed way back in 1982, not long after Pryor, in a drug-fueled fugue state, set himself on fire. That is my only comparable.
What Rock achieved last night goes beyond furthering his standing as one of the handful of comedians who matter in the present day. Early in the show Rock talks about the ways to get attention on social media. The one positive method he lists is the hardest—through excellence. Rock has taken the hard road, and it has paid off in excellence. With Selective Outrage, Rock has secured his place in the pantheon of the greatest comedians to ever hold a mic. There’s Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Chris Rock.
That’s it. That’s the list.
Many comedians are just funny, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Jim Gaffigan makes me laugh whenever I watch one of his specials. But there are levels to this shit, and the level Rock is working on isn’t just funny, it’s significant.
That is rarefied air, and as of this moment, with Bruce, Pryor, and Carlin gone from the scene, Rock is the bearer of their torch.
Last night, that torch was a blazing inferno. I’ve seldom seen anything like it.