Chris Rock took a swing in his live Netflix special, Selective Outrage — but did it land?

First, there was the slap heard around the world. Now, we finally have the rebuttal.

When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at last year's Oscars, it instantly became one of the most infamous moments in award show history. (La La Land Best Picture, who?)

In the year that's followed, Chris Rock has kept relatively quiet about the incident — until now. The comedian performed a live comedy special through Netflix — a first for the streaming platform — this past weekend, to mixed reviews from audiences.

In the wake of Chris Rock's highly-anticipated set, culture writers Kathleen Newman-Bremang, Hunter Harris and Tayo Bero joined host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to break down the performance, its source material and more.

We've included some highlights below. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Chris Rock has refused to give any interviews about the slap for the past year, and then he waited until the final 8 minutes of the special to finally bring it up. Kathleen, did it live up to what people had been expecting for a whole year?

Kathleen: I mean, I can answer for me, and my Twitter timeline, and most of the reviews I've read and say, no. He's had a year, as you mentioned, to come up with this material, and I think of course people were expecting him to address the slap, and he left that right till the end to have this kind of mic drop moment. And instead, honestly, it was just a whimper. The jokes were not funny, period, and I know that that's subjective, but that's how I felt and how a lot of people felt. He had a year and what he came up with was that respectability politics joke that I hated—

Elamin: —that's the idea that you don't fight in front of white people., that's the respectability politics joke.

Kathleen: Yes, exactly. I hated that joke. He took personal jabs at Jada [Pinkett Smith], which for the record was the thing that got him slapped in the first place, and Jada did not do that. Will [Smith] did that. But he talked about her entanglements outside of her marriage, which felt really unoriginal. Every single thing Chris Rock said, we have already heard or seen a variation of on Twitter from other angry old dudes. And as far as expectations, I think I wasn't expecting him to still be so angry. This felt like the slap was yesterday and he was raging about this fresh wound. 

He was so upset and so riled up that he bungled one of his biggest jokes. He was trying to joke about Will Smith's movie, Concussion, and the punchline is that Will tried to give Chris a concussion. It's a terrible joke. 

Elamin: Terrible joke.

Kathleen: Terrible joke. But instead, he said Emancipation, and he had to backtrack and say the joke again. And then, the joke that was actually about Emancipation was that he watched the movie — which is about slavery — so that he could watch Will get whipped. And in my opinion, that joke was more vile than anything Will did to him. 

Listen, I'm not condoning the slap. I think it was a dumb move, in the heat of the moment. But it was also so absurd. Like a grown, rich man slapping another grown man on stage at the Oscars? That's funny. And Chris Rock couldn't come up with a single good joke about it! Like, it's not that serious, and he took it very seriously. He just whined and had this whole bit about how people make themselves the victim these days … It just felt like a rant from an old, out-of-touch, bitter dude.

Elamin: I think that sentiment is shared across my Twitter timeline also, but also I should say that's not necessarily representative of the sentiment about this. But Tayo, I want to get into one particular dimension, which is that in the special [Chris Rock] talks about how Will Smith wasn't mad at him — he was mad at Jada Pinkett Smith, [his] wife who sort of openly talked about her entanglements with her son's friend. Let's talk about the way that he brought up Jada. What was your reaction when he brought her in?

Tayo: I think all of us can see that Jada has become an easy target in this whole debacle since the slap happened — and this has been from day one. The amount of misogynoir that she's had to deal with since the slap has happened, and her just getting thrown under the bus time and time again for a fight that happened between two men — I wasn't surprised that he brought it up. What I wasn't expecting was for him to just kind of fly into this rage and actually call her out — which, a lot of people will have heard, he called her a bitch. It was just shocking to hear that, but I wasn't surprised that he brought her into it. 

But I think the way that he also talked about her, and talked about the entanglement was also, for me, particularly disgusting because he framed it as, "oh, she was like having an affair with her son's friend," and August Alsina is a 30 year old man. This wasn't some creepy mom hanging out with her teenage son and his friends. So I think it felt a little bit intentional in trying to frame her as this predator, while also kind of throwing her under the bus along with Will Smith, in his anger at Will Smith. So I think he really went off the rails with that one, and it was kind of upsetting to watch.

Elamin: Hunter, I want to zoom out a bit and maybe talk about Chris Rock in the context of where he is in his career right now because his last special, which was directed by Bo Burnham, was this deeply vulnerable conversation about how he feels post-getting divorced. It's his reflection on how his own changing conception of masculinity has evolved after getting divorced; he sort of seemed like a new man, right? And then there's this idea of, okay, the biggest news story in the world happens to him. He's the site of all this attention. He takes a year, and I'm like, "oh, he's going to apply the same kind of deep-reflection tools that he developed in that last special, into this." And then this comes out, and there seems like such a large gap between this new-leaf-newly-introspective Chris Rock to just, I guess, a fountain of anger that didn't really seem to have a particular point.

Hunter: Yeah, I think watching this special and comparing it to Tambourine, which I did really enjoy, there was not a lot of introspection, not a lot of growth, and it just seemed very bitter. I think he was trying to, in the first couple of minutes of the set, take on "woke" culture or the culture mob or whatever, and instead of being very incisive, it just felt sort of meaninglessly and baselessly contrarian. I think we've seen the same thing with Dave Chappelle, for example, really doubling down on being incredibly transphobic. I think we've known Chris Rock to be sort of the incisive and sharp cultural commentator, and listening to him talk about victimhood and political correctness, it reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby sort of respectability politics; all of that stuff felt so old and dated, and the Chris Rock that made Tambourine and the Chris Rock that did this special were not in the same wheelhouse at all. Even just the performance felt really not in the pocket of what he's really good at. I thought the jokes were weak, but the delivery was also pretty lackluster.

Elamin: Let me ask you, Tayo: it seems like every comedian now seems to feel a responsibility to talk about this idea of "woke culture." What do you think is going on there? What are they reacting to? Because to me, it seems like they're reacting to the need for them to censor themselves — and they really don't want to do that — and I'm not sure how comfortably they're handling it.

Tayo: Right. I think what we're seeing, this reactivity that we're seeing from a lot of — and I think we should be specific, it's a lot of male comics who are reacting to what they're calling "woke" culture — is them kind of reacting to the fact that they're now going to be held accountable for their words, and that they now have to treat vulnerable people like humans. And I think all of these men are now spiraling because they're going to have to be careful with their words, they know they're going to be held accountable in some way, and they don't know how to deal with that. And they've been able to do this job, and in some cases do it badly, with impunity, and I think for a lot of them they're just in this moment and kind of spiraling.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.