Selective Outrage tweaked after he fluffed a gag about Will Smith

Netflix has re-edited Chris Rock’s ‘live’ stand-up special to fix him fluffing a joke.

The streaming service recorded a first last Saturday night when it aired the comic’s Selective Outrage show as it happened from the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore.

But Rock bungled the set-up for one gag in the headline-grabbing closing section in which he spoke about Will Smith slapping him on stage at last year’s Oscars ceremony for making a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.

The stand-up said there had been bad blood between him and the Smith family since 2016, when Jada told him should have refused to host the Academy Awards due to the lack of diversity in nominations.

Rock’s joke was: ‘Years ago, his wife said I should quit the Oscars. I shouldn’t host because Will didn’t get nominated for Concussion. She said I, a grown-ass man, should quit his job because her husband didn’t get nominated for Concussion – and then this n***** gives me a concussion.’

But in the live show he mistakenly referred to the film as Emancipation – Smiths’s latest movie in which he plays an enslaved man during the Civil War – before realising his mistake would ruin the punchline and correcting himself.

Netflix has now re-edited the section to show Rock setting it up correctly – losing the edge of spontaneity of the live broadcast –  while adding a note that the special ‘filmed live and edited’.

Selective Outrage  was the 7th most-watched show on Netflix in the US last week, but did not make the top ten in the UK or globally.

» Chris ​Rock:  Selective Outrage review

Published: 10 Mar 2023