Will Smith’s straight arm slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars was, for my money, the most interesting event ever to have transpired at any awards show in history. It pips even my previous favourite, which was when Jarvis Cocker ran onstage during the 1996 Brits to reveal his buttocks in protest at Michael Jackson’s ludicrously overblown performance of Earth Song.
Did Rock ask to be attacked for humiliating Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, on account of her alopecia? Yes, of course. But that was the point. The joke was predicated entirely on the comic getting away with saying the unsayable – a formulation of words intended to be deeply provocative – and for the audience to experience the attendant risk as electricity. That’s the conceit that makes the joke work.
Stripped of context, Rock’s gag – that Pinkett-Smith is bald and therefore could be cast as GI Jane – would be beneath most bores, let alone one of the most celebrated comics of all time. But delivered as an aside mere metres from her husband? Well, that’s a different proposition.
As much as commentators will pretend to be outraged by the slap, it was hugely entertaining.
But the art of good comedy is to be funny by transgressing without getting punched or slapped. If you tell a joke at someone’s expense and shortly afterward take a blow to the face – especially if you’re a world famous comedian at the top of your game – then you’ve failed, because you’ve made two catastrophic misjudgements. First about your audience and then about the location of the mythical ‘line’.
Comedians love lately to tell anyone who’ll listen that jokes ‘are just words’ – and for this reason if you take offence you are in some way deficient. But that is nonsense. A well-delivered vicious joke is up there with the most violent forms of speech available to humanity – a truth all of us first learns in the playground. It’s for this reason that people who are able spontaneously to be both cutting and funny wield such enormous social power.
Rock acknowledged this in the immediate aftermath of the assault, when Smith had returned to his front row seat. Looking down at his attacker from the stage, eyes glittering dangerously, he said: ‘I could…’ He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. The implication was clear. ‘I could destroy you from up here.’ To his professional credit, however, he went on with the show.
Hollywood is a town built on nothing if not the enduring appeal of female honour being defended by male heroes. The vast majority of films – certainly, pre-political correctness – are retellings of the damsel in distress narrative.
It goes without saying that the corporate vampires who organise the Oscars will have noticed what a little fisticuffs over a woman wronged has done for ratings. Fighting uppity comperes who think it’s ok to make risqué jokes about the fairer sex – or any minority, for that matter – will now surely become something agents encourage male stars to do at set-piece industry shindigs, on the basis that this way gongs lie.
Hollywood, I predict, is as result about to get a great deal more butch. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Over the last three decades, maybe more, the stars of the silver screen have become so insufferably wet – uniform now in their desire to seen as bleeding hearts for some cause or other.
I can’t be alone in thinking Ricky Gervais being head-butted by, say, Mel Gibson, would be something I’d very dearly love to see, ideally immediately after the comedian had delivered one of his trademark high-handed diatribes at the Golden Globes.
Yes, Gervais is brilliant, and, yes, the absurd Hollywood elite deserve more than any other group on the planet to be remorselessly mocked, not least for their lack of self-awareness. But there’s also, too, always something delightful about witnessing cosmic justice delivered unanswerably to the guy running his mouth. ‘Not so funny now, eh?’ There’s a reason this is another highly popular narrative for movies.
Neither Will Smith nor Chris Rock will suffer as a result of what happened on Monday night. The opposite. Both will prosper. Smith’s credentials as an archetypal alpha male, questioned in recent years as a result of his seeming acceptance of his wife’s marital infidelity, have been burnished. That will lead, inevitably, to more work as a leading man. Rock, on the other hand, has in an instant been gifted material for a new 500-date sell-out international comedy tour.
Do we, the audience, also benefit from what took place? Of course we do. As much as commentators will pretend to be outraged by the slap, it was hugely entertaining. Ultimately, if that’s not all you look to Hollywood for, the joke’s on you.
Comments