TV review: Chris Rock comments on royals and Will Smith in Selective Outrage
Chris Rock is front-and-centre of Netflix streaming special 'Selective Outrage'
- Chris Rock: Selective Outrage
- Netflix
Live broadcast is the future of streaming. So reckons Netflix, which is following its rival Amazon Prime into real-time programming. Its first toe in the water is a comedy special starring Chris Rock which airs at 3am Irish time and arrives a week ahead of the first anniversary of 'that Oscars slap' That was, of course, the incident in which Will Smith rushed the stage and thwacked Rock after the comedian made a quip about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Smith has been in non-stop apology mode ever since — though this was not enough to prevent the Academy from hitting him with a 10-year Oscar ban. Rock, has, by contrast, kept his powder dry. With his new special, , he finally gives his version of events. And he isn’t holding back.
Or rather he is holding back. Because, except for a brief quip about the idea that “words hurt” (not compared to assault, they don’t he says), he saves the Slap material until the very end.
Up to that point, the 60-minute or so set in a comedic mixed bag. There’s some hot-button stuff about Meghan Markle and racism in the British royal family.
He is astonished that Markle would be astonished by the Windsor's 19th-century views: “Going on Oprah, saying ‘I had no idea how racist they were’. That’s the Royal family. You didn’t Google those motherf*****s? They’re the original racists. They invented colonialism.”
Rock also discusses his daughter and her expulsion from an elite school. Rock grew up poor in Brooklyn and while he wants the best for his kids, he was shocked to see his daughter laughing off a threatened expulsion. So much so that he went to the principal and demanded she be expelled — because of the valuable life lesson she would learn.
The humour is uneven and viewers' mileage may vary when it comes to Rock’s frenetic style. But it’s a perfect fit for his stuff about Will Smith, whom he skewers with the same lack of mercy with which Smith thumped him at the Oscars.
“I love Will Smith, my whole life… he makes great movies. I have rooted for Will Smith my whole life. I root for this motherf**ker,” he says. “And now I watch [in which Smith plays a slave] just to see him get whooped.”
It’s fast and furious and, after an hour of so-co comedy, a reminder Rock has not lost his mojo. It’s just a shame the rest of the set feels so slight and bloodless by comparison.
