‘It still hurts’: Chris Rock goes after Will Smith and also makes Netflix history

Nearly one year after getting slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars, Chris Rock finally hit back in a highly anticipated new Netflix stand-up special that aired live Saturday night.

“People are like, ‘Did it hurt?’ It still hurts!” Rock joked in his new special, Selective Outrage. “I got ‘Summertime’ ringing in my ear.”

Rock, 58, speaking to a live audience at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, told jokes about the incident for the first time in front of a national audience. The comedian said he thinks the slap really had its origins between Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who had what she described as a romantic “entanglement” with singer August Alsina while the couple were separated.

“Will Smith practices selective outrage,” Rock joked. “She hurt him way more that he hurt me.”

During last year’s Academy Awards ceremony, Smith walked up to the stage and assaulted Rock with a slap in the face after the comedian made a joke referencing Pinkett Smith’s baldness, which is due to alopecia. Smith was banned from the Academy Awards for a decade, and he has publicly apologized numerous times.

None of that stopped Rock from eviscerating both onstage Saturday night. Rock ridiculed Smith for taking his frustrations out on a smaller person (”Will Smith played Muhammad Ali. Do you think I auditioned for that part?!”) and mocked the couple for discussing intimate and emotional aspects of their relationship publicly.

“We’ve all been cheated on,” Rock joked to the audience. “None of us have ever been interviewed by the person that cheated on us on television.”

After flubbing a joke about Smith’s role as a doctor taking on the NFL in Concussion, Rock ended the special mocking Smith over his latest role in Apple’s Emancipation, where he portrays a man attempting to escape slavery in 19th-century Louisiana.

“I have rooted for Will Smith my whole life,” Rock said. “Now, I watch Emancipation just to see him get whooped.”

Apart from Rock’s remarks about Smith, the special was also a first for Netflix, which had previously never offered any live programming. The streaming giant sandwiched Rock’s special between some awkward celebrity worship of the comedian (including Bono’s weird riff on Jailhouse Rock) and a live postshow discussion that featured comedians Dana Carvey, David Spade, J.B. Smoove, Arsenio Hall, and Yvone Orji and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Hall, who first featured Rock’s stand-up comedy on his former talk show back in the late 1980s, brought up an incident involving Smith on the set of Emancipation. During filming, Smith said a white actor spit on him twice in ad-libbed moments that surprised and upset him.

“Now Will did not slap that white man,” Hall said.

This year’s Academy Awards are scheduled to air live on ABC on March 12, at 8 p.m. Eastern. Netflix will stream next year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards live.