Chris Rock Not Over It

[Phineas Gage]

Rock’s “Selective Outrage” Live Netflix special last night was not a masterpiece, but I liked it better than NPR’s critic Eric Deggans does in linked review, and several other notices I read over this morning. If you missed it and have no intention to watch for yourself, the LA Times has a very descriptive summary, along with long verbatim excerpts. 

Liberals, especially younger ones, really do need to figure out how to get their heads out of their own asses when it comes to unpopular speech, or they will continue to make themselves easy targets for the most idiotic conservative commentator, and find themselves ceding an issue they should own, free speech, to conservatives. There is a real if occasionally fuzzy boundary between harmful speech and speech you dislike or disagree with. I thought Rock, unlike Chappelle in his last special,  occupied ground which may be unpopular and sometimes even wrong (I agree with Deggans that there is an objective factual difference between Michael Jackson and R. Kelly) but is not assaultive and damaging.

The main problem was that so many of the pieces of the set felt a little stale. I saw Rock live in Oakland a year or two before the pandemic, and I recognized bits and pieces only slightly we worked from that set. It seemed clear that he really had like 15 min of new things to say (after all, he had just crafted a whole new act that he was debuting a year ago, and spent much of the last 12 months performing it, so he can’t have that much new to say and ready for public presentation) but still had to fill like 75 minutes. 

Under those circumstances I thought he demonstrated his professional craftsmanship. He re-packaged some standard stuff to lay the foundation for the main arguments he wanted to make about the Smith incident. I would have upgraded him from a B to a B+ or better if he had figured out a way to connect his “selective outrage” theme from the general culture to the Smiths (which he did) and then all the way to himself (which he did not). Enraged rants from a prowling, Panther like Rock are familiar, but the anger that erupted in the last ten minutes was not political or social but intensely personal, and it’s intensity a year later begged for the comic microscope that Rock is capable of deploying with such insight and devastation.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/05/1161184907/netflixs-chris-rock-selective-outrage-reveals-a-lot-of-anger-for-will-smith?sc=ipad&f=1001

[Bob Jersey]

As part of his shredding of Smith, Rock got two of his movies mixed up... he meant to refer to Concussion, but said "Emancipation"... the joke, which he straightaway admitted to f-ing up, has been removed from Netflix's recorded version of the special...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-edits-chris-rock-special-will-smith-joke-1235347226/ (link)

B

PGage, March 5th, in part:

[PGage]

That got a lot of attention in immediate reactions, but I was more impressed with how well he circled back and set it up correctly so he could deliver the punch line. I told my wife at the time if it were a regular comedy special they would just edit the flubbed part out, so not surprised Netflix did that on the archived version.

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