Was Will Smith right to slap Chris Rock at the Oscars? Well, there’s an obvious answer to that question, and then two other potential answers. The obvious answer is “who cares?”. After all, two millionaires squabbling over the propriety of a joke is hardly even in the top million most important things happening on the planet at the moment.
But the obvious answer doesn’t account for the immense public interest in the question. Whether we like it or not, a significant proportion of the world’s population spent yesterday arguing over that question. In part, the fascination comes from the nature of the people involved: It turns out that these mega-rich celebrities are just like us, after all.
Smith, like a gazillion men in pubs before him, took offence at something some fellow said, and responded with his fists. Rock, like a gazillion men before him, got a little too smart with his jokes, and earned himself a slap. The same thing will happen in a hundred Irish nightclubs this year, and nobody will pay a blind bit of notice. But when it happens in full view of the public, on a globally televised event, we all have an opportunity to talk about the dynamics of human relationships more freely than usually. Here’s the slap heard around the globe:
The Full Uncensored video of Will Smith’s altercation with Chris Rock at the #Oscars pic.twitter.com/cGQ3plSEiz
— Movies (@moreoffilms) March 28, 2022
There are two events here, really: The first is the joke that sets off the slap, and the second is the slap itself.
It’s a bad joke: The woman in question, Jada Pinkett Smith, has been very open about the illness that caused her hair loss. And, what’s more, she has been very open about the fact that losing her hair was very upsetting for her. You don’t have to be the world’s most empathetic person to imagine that for somebody in the public eye, who was known and famous in part for her beauty, that suddenly losing one’s hair might be traumatic.
What’s more: Is there any other illness that a joke like that would be made about? Would Rock, for example, have made a joke about the late Christopher Reeve being a paraplegic, to Reeve’s face, right in front of a global audience? Probably not. There’s a cruelty to that, making fun of somebody for something they can’t control. It’s on the same level as making jokes about fat people, or anorexics, or people with a disfigurement. They already know they look odd, and it’s not nice to have people laughing at it.
Was Smith right to be angry? Sure, he was. While the precise dynamics of his relationship with his wife (reportedly they have an open marriage, which, to be honest, wouldn’t be for me, now) might be unconventional, it seems relatively clear that he loves her. He probably knows more than anybody how upset she was by her illness and hair loss. There is, after all, such a thing as putting a brave face on these things in public, and being very upset by them in private.
Was he right to slap Rock on the stage? Absolutely not. That’s assault, at the end of the day. Perhaps the weirdest thing about the whole event is that he marched onto the stage, assaulted the host, and then resumed his seat… with no consequences. Try doing that at a comedy show if you’re a normal person, and see how you get on.
But that’s a matter of law. It’s not the kind of thing anybody should do, and it’s illegal. But the law exists because it’s the kind of thing that happens. There’s no law against getting up on the stage and singing about how upset you are in response to a comedian’s joke, because nobody has ever done that. Laws exist, in other words, to regulate things that might actually happen. What Smith did was a predictable and foreseeable human reaction to a public embarrassment of somebody he loves.
So, in other words there are two distinct elements to this: On the one hand, Rock should not have been slapped. On the other hand, his joke was obnoxious and cruel. When you behave in that way, getting slapped is one of a range of things that might happen. He probably didn’t expect it to happen on international television, to be fair, but them’s the breaks.
The bottom line here is that Rock deserved the slap. Which is not the same thing as saying that slapping him was the right thing to do – it clearly was not. But if we’re all honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that if somebody publicly humiliated somebody we loved like that, for a cheap laugh, we’d probably want to react just like Smith did. There are ways to be funny without making other people feel small, or as if they are the butt of the joke. Chris Rock is a great comedian, but this time, he stepped across the line on the wrong day, at the wrong time. It wasn’t necessary, or funny.