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arch 29 was a tough morning-after for people who count themselves fans of BOTH Chris Rock and Will Smith.
ICYMI and have spent the week offline, on the orders of your Mother Superior, here’s what went down late in Sunday’s Oscar show. First, the joke and the slap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKl9xPROmaE
Then, a half hour later, Will Smith’s surreal acceptance speech for his Best Actor award:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvgCMZSkyw
So presto, a brand new front in the culture wars, with everyone obliged to choose a side. Clips from the after-party, where Smith danced holding his trophy, showed a sometimes unsettling level of acquiescence: “Sometimes, when it’s about your wife or someone, you just can’t help it, you know?” “Well, Chris got sloppy, and what happened happened.” Tiffany Haddish gushed that the attack was “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Actually, it was the opposite,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (yes, the same one) dryly responded the next day, in a brisk and lucid piece entitled “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing.” But Roxane Gay still thought the main point was that women and minorities are under too much pressure to “take” jokes. The one certain thing was that everyone wanted to talk about the episode. Including me.
Comments on a New York Times page I visited were almost unanimous in condemning Smith. A joke was a joke, however tasteless or cruel, whereas assault was assault. There had been a dozen better ways to respond, and the one Smith chose constituted “toxic masculinity,” not chivalry, if there is a difference. “Smith needs to repeat kindergarten,” said one commenter. Don’t we teach kids that it’s always wrong to respond physically to merely verbal attacks? Another opined that Rock, well known as a shock comic, “was only doing his job.” (Cf. Amy Schumer’s earlier crack, ageist if you like, even reverse-sexist if you are determined to be a pill, at the expense of JK Simmons’ baldness; it raised no eyebrows except Simmons’s, briefly, up onto the unmapped expanses of his forehead.)
The most disturbing aspect of the affair (many said, and I concur) was the audience reaction. Smith sucker-punches Rock, then gets a standing ovation thirty minutes later? (OK, sucker-slaps, but there is a reason Smith was once cast as Muhammad Ali, and Rock’s face afterwards, if you study the video, looks bruised.) Then that classic non-apology apology, half unhinged, deeply self-absorbed, in which Smith slaloms between defiance and contrition, weeps theatrically, and declares himself to be on a mission from God to protect people (not Rock, it seems).
Just imagine you are Chris Rock as you watch that speech, and the incongruity smacks you in the face. What on earth is the audience saying with that frequent applause and final ovation? That it approves of your getting hit? (Hit and shamed, as the iron laws of victim-blaming tend to have it.) That we now have an implicit code duello that prescribes physical retribution for perceived insults?
The truth I think is that the audience is just rattled, like the rest of us, and wants to have it both ways: well, the joke wasn’t OK, but the slap was worse, and can we all just get along? In times of stress, you fall back on what you know, and Hollywood is in the empathy business. Faced with a weepy, floundering Will Smith, who may have just thrown away his career at its zenith, it knows what to do: support, don’t judge.
In the aftermath, though, we will all be busily unpacking this precedent, struggling to articulate just what we have signed on for. What are the rules for safe kidding, for what is acceptable in jokes and responses to jokes? Trouble is, such discussion tends to yield mainly prissy, overly sweeping taboos that are little help in navigating real cases. Is it OK to make fun of a woman (or man) for a medical condition affecting her appearance? Well, of course not, when you put it that way. But such generalizations give ground to dozens of caveats. What if the mockery is gentled down to mere teasing? What if the target herself really enjoys it, understanding that it is more a sign of affection than the reverse (something that seems to happen more with men, I grant you)? What if the effect or at least the intent is not to isolate but to include? These are sweet spots that Rock’s mean sally missed, ipso facto. But they were there to be hit.
Another problem is that, as soon as you have painstakingly thrashed out a set of ground rules, a new comic will come crack everybody up by playing fast and loose with them, dancing along the edge of every border you have drawn. The Muse of Laughter resists codification.
At the Times site, one lonely commenter remarked diffidently that she didn't get why everyone considered Rock’s remark cruel. Shouldn’t a comparison to the young, beautiful Demi Moore of GI Jane be considered complimentary? As so often with a woman in a loud room hitting the nail on the head, she was completely ignored. But in the end there is no certain way to distinguish the offensive from the not, too far from far enough. It's all a matter of timing, touch, and intuition on one side, personal sensitivity on the other. The only way to know is to give it a shot.
This is a Golden Age of comedy, but also a Dark Age. Golden in the astonishing abundance of talent and the substantive, insightful ways a Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee or Amy Schumer (I could name a dozen more) engages the issues of the day. When I’m in the market for real insight, when I’m jonesing for perspective on the latest crisis or lived difficulty, I often seem to get more of it from these laugh-wranglers than from serious thinkers at the Times or the Atlantic. Ostensible trouble-makers all, they in fact mostly turn down the temperature, disarming sensitive topics and troublesome biases. They pretend to be sowing discord but are really bent on knitting the tribe back together, by way of a catharsis marked unmistakably with loud guffaws.
But it’s also a Dark Age, because at the level of theory, no one wants to endorse comedy’s lawless energy or its paradoxical dynamics, the way it stings in order to soothe. We have too much skin in the game. The right despises wit for the way it undermines the required state of ecstatic credulity. The left worries that it is mostly a form of cruelty, one more way that dominant groups torment the rest of us. Both sides assume, half unintentionally, that humor in its essence is what meme culture tends to make of it: a mean unfunny jeer, an endless “So there!” For both sides, a joke is fundamentally just another bit of axe-grinding, a way of pushing a thesis or devaluing someone. It might as well be a one-word slur or a fifty-word editorial.
If we could exhume and resurrect Queen Victoria, she would surely, at some point, tell us that we all need to lighten up.
What Keats said about poetry seems to me almost equally true of comedy: it does no harm from its relish of the dark side, because it ends in speculation – though “nonsense” might be the better term for comedy’s distinctive mode of impartiality. The professional jokester relinquishes all possible truth claims. She invariably proposes a slightly bent new way of looking at things, but effectively denies the suggestion in the act of making it, then leaves the decision strictly to you. To the extent that she really tries to convince you of something or improve your morals, the act grows less funny, and the response dies into that tense silence that the comedian dreads like death.
Every child learns early that laughter can cut like knives, but that in luckier cases, probably most cases, it warms and nurtures. One kind of laughter signals rejection and expulsion, the other affection and acceptance, but the two can be perilously difficult to tell apart. For rough teasing, the rule tends to be, the nastier, the better, because the more worried it gets you early on, the more joyous the relief and release at the end. Teasing can be far more delicious than mere politeness and friendly decency, because it is so much more personal: it makes some reckoning with your actual failings before it relents and welcomes you into the group, after a bit of testing that has made you feel really seen, seen but forgiven. Scathing frankness is one reason that children make friends so much more quickly and profoundly than adults.
But no pain, no gain. There is always the risk of genuinely hurt feelings, the worst of these (yes) being the ones hidden behind forced smiles.
There is such a thing as heartless mockery, of course, and as slashing, unrelenting, Swiftian satire. There is the humor of the Mean Girls’ table, universally feared. This brand of laughter doesn’t aim to welcome anyone, but just the opposite: to drive out rascals and villains, to blast away falsehood and make room for truth (an imperfect version, in the Mean Girls’ case). Wielded by a Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, or George Carlin, maybe even a Michelle Wolf, such savagery brings joy of a different kind than the inclusive humor of the bachelor party or the celebrity roast. Almost the whole trick is that the target or scapegoat is never here. He is safely outside the auditorium, and the rest of us can happily bond at his expense.
But the kind joke, the well-told and eventually forgiving joke, the kind professional comedians mostly try to tell, still gets most of its energy from cruelty, and that is what fools the theorists. They think the mock-cruelty of the joke is the real thing, nastiness not just the jumping off point but also the destination. They see only hostility, never the sudden transformation to its opposite, the Houdini escape at the punch line. They reduce and literalize everything down to real aggression and bigotry and thus arrive at the lowest possible opinion of humor. At best they end up prescribing and approving as comedy the dullest pablum that ever got a kid hounded from the stage on amateur night.
For the record, I disliked Chris Rock’s joke and winced in real time. Too much, too far, shouldn’t have gone there. His failure, though, was not one of principle but only one of art. His touch and timing off for once, he missed the catch from the other trapeze.
On the tape, about two seconds after Smith’s blow, Rock cries, “It was a GI Jane joke!” in a tone not of anger but of bewilderment and dawning regret. If only he could explain! He knows perfectly well his job is not to insult or injure; he never meant such a thing. The joke was in an established genre, it had been field-tested, and he took the precaution of shouting out “Love you!” to Will and Jada before he attempted it.
But no comedian gets to explain: the stony-faced audience has already rendered the verdict from which there is no appeal. Now the joke’s failure, so I imagine, hurts Rock worse than his stinging jaw, and the slap seems above all simply gratuitous. Kings do not slap their court jesters, or their therapists.
So now for a moment, Rock stands as the improbable icon of a man who couldn’t tell a joke, Will Smith as the epitome of those who just can’t take one. It’s clear that the second failing is worse than the first, even before we get to the whole difference between speaking and hitting. Rock has been justly praised for his grace in a graceless moment, while Will Smith’s apologies, basically competent on the second and third tries, will always seem belated and possibly calculating. Still a fan but less so, I look forward to seeing more of Smith’s funny, expressive acting, especially if he makes more movies like Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. What I really can’t wait to see, though, is the comic riff Chris Rock will make out of this sad episode. I have no doubt he will do what comedians always do for the rest of us: make it less sad.
