Hypothetically at the 1966 Oscars, Bob Hope makes a racial crack at Steve McQueen’s wife, and McQueen slaps Bob Hope. A lot of people would be secretly happy, but Steve McQueen’s telephone would never ring again.
But we live in a post-Trump, post-shame world, so…
What kind of man slaps like a little girl?
A Will Smith kind of man?
More precisely one calculating/miscalculating the performative value.
I wish Rock had said, after the slap, “Now I know why you didn’t win the Oscar for Ali.”
I’m kind of surprised Elon Musk has not offered to fight them both.
Will Smith and his wife have an open marriage, maybe Jada had a little piece of Rock.
I remember years of Celebrity Roasts wit Don Rickles, a master of the one line burn. At a roast, I expect to get everybody smacktalking and burning the honoree.
I do NOT expect an award show for cultural events [films and documentaries are considered cultural more or less] to stand around and smacktalk someone. Rock committed effectively verbal assault on her. If she had gotten up and bitchslapped him, or stood there and screamed invective at him for that very tasteless joke, she would have gotten told she was a snowflake.
Next years Oscars, I hope someone tells some big macho actor that he can’t get it up without viagra, or needs a manty girdle to contain his muffin tops, or to rag on him for a toupee [Sean Connory, for what it is worth wore a toup for years, as did William Shatner. Pretty sure there are more that wear toups, and I can see a few men wearing spanks for their muffin tops.] There are jokes, then there are asshole comments masquerading as jokes. Verbal and physical offensive actions do not belong at a show like the Oscars/Grammys/Tonys. Save them for roasts.
mrAru has it. What one doesn’t normally get from the wiki is that eyebrows keep sweat out of the face, eye lashes sweep the eyes and can veil against blown dust, and nosehairs are the first filter to keeping crap out of your sinus cavity and lungs. He now has a tendency to eye infections, corneal scratches, sinus infections and upper respiratory issues. Well, and if he doesn’t wear a hat, scalp sunburn while out mowing or other yardwork. OK, the bud light of autoimmune disorders that causes a cascade of other issues. Yay mrAru for not having lupus or MS.
Have you ever watched the Oscars? Comedians poking fun at the attendees is almost half the show.
Honestly, I stopped watching the Oscars after I moved out of my parent’s house, I prefer movies to awards for movies. So I can categorically say that other than perhaps a film clip of something on another show [like one of those retrospectives] I have not bothered with watching them in at least 25 years that I can think of, more like 30.
[I did however see Lady Gaga with Liza Minelli, and that was wonderful.]
I can’t believe so many people are siding with Will Smith and claiming verbal abuse is just as bad as physical assault.
There are reasons that we have many laws about physical assault, and very few (as far as I know) about verbal abuse.
For those who think the joke about a disability is just as bad as a slap, would you be OK with a society that jails/fines you if you make unsavory jokes, just as it jails/fines you for physical assault?
Also:
If Wanda Sykes made the GI Jane joke and Will Smith got up and slapped her, would you be OK with that? Would you ‘cut him some slack’ as some of you stated above?
If Rock made a joke at the expense of a minor celebrity and that celebrity went up and slapped Rock on stage, don’t you think the minor celebrity would have been immediately escorted out of the room? The fact that Smith wasn’t, was disgraceful. The standing ovation was even more of a disgrace, as Jim Carrey also said in his recent interview.
The real problem is Chris made a 28 year old reference and somehow didn’t make a Dora Milajae joke.
Pretty sure Jada would have been torn as whether or not to be offended if Chris said, “And Jada? (crosses arms) Wakanda Forever!”
And also the idea that Jada goaded Will into this by giving him a Look. I don’t like to see a woman busting a man’s balls and making him do something, even if it’s against his own judgment. How is that any less bad than a man intimidating a woman into acting against her own judgment?
I guess so, but that’s a big re-calibration for me. Would you call this a workplace assault then 
I said what I did because people are using the ominous sounding, “She has an autoimmune disease!” to treat her as some broken, Dickensian character with a wasting disease in need of defense and our pity. I’m confident neither her, nor your husband, fit this bill. Using that as justification for Will needing to leap to her defense and strike someone is patently ridiculous, and probably also a host of insulting things to her agency and womanhood that I’m not the best equipped to detail.
All diseases, health issues, conditions, injuries bring with them their own unique challenges, of course. I’m perhaps a little too aware of how our bodies are a miracle of interconnecting processes, and how a wrench in any of those processes can cause a cascade of bad things. The years have taught me how things can always be worse. When I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I frequently told myself, “Well, at least I don’t have Crohn’s disease, that’s even worse!” I don’t know if that’s an unusual attitude, but I’m not wrong. Eventually, my diagnosis was changed to Crohn’s disease.
It can always be worse.
I know you’re being sarcastic. Why someone would choose those two diseases to be sarcastic about not having is a mystery, but yes, so much yes. Yay for not having lupus or MS.
My stepsister has lupus, which first expressed itself when she was 22. She had joined the army to become a OR nurse, but it wasn’t long before she couldn’t work. When she got medically discharged, they took good care of her (at least back then, they did that). Really good medical coverage, thank goodness. Decades of doctors, hospital visits, procedures and operations. In the beginning, she had to make frequent trips to Walter Reed in Washington DC, because it was so poorly understood that they were the ones best-equipped to help her. She and the rest of us lived hundreds of miles away from there.
Forty years later, she’s had a kidney transplant from her aging father, and two hip transplants because the pharmacy’s worth of meds she takes every day destroyed the bone marrow. Arthritis comes with lupus in an incredible 2-for-1 deal, and she’s had both knees replaced as well. Lupus brings with it a compromised immune system leaving her open to catching everything that comes her way, and the anti-rejection drugs she takes for her transplant only makes it worse. Like your husband, she has trouble with the sun. She gets horrible rashes and full-on flare-ups if she’s exposed, so she doesn’t go outside except to travel to another place indoors, and she covers up well. . remarkably, she’s still kicking all these years later, metaphorically at least, and active in her church. She’s a strong woman. So many years of pain.
MS is worse than all that.
By way of contrast, two of the things you list as unseen side-effects of alopecia, sweat in the eyes and sunburn, can simultaneously be mitigated with a baseball cap. But yay for not having lupus or MS.
It can always be worse.
I considered it, but this doesn’t change much, other than making Jada an enabler (which I already mentioned as a possibility). It doesn’t mean she hasn’t also been slapped by Will and decided she deserved it (or even vice versa). And, even if not, it doesn’t mean that either one of them haven’t slapped their kids.
I am aware that there are women who like it when their “man” is violent. If I hadn’t been, I’ve been reminded of it when I keep seeing people defending them. It doesn’t make this any better.
Oh, and @SenorBeef, obviously psychopath was an exaggeration. Nothing else I said was, though. I have direct experience with the issue in question. Not only have I had issues with anger and know exactly how hard it is to “snap” in a way that involves running up and doing that to someone in person, but I actually have family who have done it, who believe in this exact macho culture.
It’s like that SNL skit with Tom Hanks (I think it was). There’s a lot of common culture with poor whites and poor blacks. (Yes, Will isn’t poor, but his actions come from him growing up in that culture. There’s a reason people called it “West Philly Justice” and stuff.
I objected to the idea that you could conclude that because he used violence against another man, he probably uses violence against his wife and/or kids. There’s definitely a lot of overlap between those two groups, but it’s nowhere near total.
Made me smile.
I’m going to make a second post to address a key component I see missing in this thread. This was a joke about a black woman’s hair. This is a very fraught subject, with a very racist history. Black women have historically had to cover up their hair in order to avoid discrimination. There’s this whole history of having to cover it up. Jada not wearing a wig is a powerful anti-racist statement. I can’t remotely do the concept justice here, but just google “black women hair” and read up on the cultural baggage that has.
Chris Rock surely knows this as a black man. He knew the racist baggage here. He also almost certainly knows Jada is sick, and how shitty it is to make fun of someone for their illness. And he apparently has a history with being mean to the Smiths.
Obviously none of this justifies what Will did. I am hard against that. But, with the cultural and personal context here, it is not a a mildly offensive joke. And Chris Rock most likely knew that. And if Smith had actually stood up for his wife out of empathy, rather than getting up in macho honor culture bullshit, he might have been able to explain why and not become the bigger bully.
I don’t see how what you just said and how you describe my post are different. I’m not saying there is total overlap. Just that it is likely.
What I mainly think is that this wasn’t the first time Will Smith did this, or even the first time in a while. And that the most likely targets would be those he spends the most time with.
Plus, those who believe in this sort of macho man culture also tend to believe in corporal punishment. They’re two sides of the same coin.