Chris Rock first talks about Will Smith's slap

For weeks, last March, there was nothing but talk of that: the slap in the face of comedian Chris Rock delivered by Will Smith, offended by a joke about alopecia of his wife Jada Pinkett, at the last Oscars. Lots of speculations, opinions and even Smith's own apologies. The only one who had not yet addressed the subject, perhaps to avoid fueling the storm, was Rock himself. Now, however, it seems that he has found the right distance to discuss it and in two distinct comedy shows he held over the weekend, one in New York and the other in New Jersey, he made statements about it: "Whoever says that words do evil never got punched in the face ”, the comedian would have said:“ I'm not a victim, anyway. Yeah, it hurt, f * ck. But I shrugged it all off and went to work the next day. ”

“ I don't go to the hospital for a cut ”, he continued, showing a kind of detachment from what had happened. In fact, he had previously intervened on the fact only last April, reiterating that he wanted to leave the episode behind without further comment: “I'm fine, I have my new show and I don't want to talk until I get paid. Life is good. My hearing has also returned ”, he said ironically, but alluding to a possibility of compensation. Immediately after slapping Rock on the Oscars stage, Will Smith made a statement apologizing to him, the Academy and the audience: “I went too far and I was wrong. I'm embarrassed and my actions don't reflect the man I want to be, ”he said before being banned from the prestigious film awards ceremony for the next ten years.

If Smith is going through a rather complicated period from a professional point of view, with films postponed and future projects pending, Chris Rock instead is doing very well and is touring the United States with his Ego Death Tour , a comedy tour. Not that it's free from controversy, though: just last weekend his show and that of his colleague Kevin Hart was opened by Dave Chappelle, another veteran of American comedy whose show a few days earlier in Minnesota had been canceled due to protests against. his transphobic positions. Rock, who will tour Europe with Chappelle in September, has always defended his colleague and has often lashed out against the so-called cancel culture which, according to him, has made comedy boring and not very funny.