On Saturday (March 4) night, Chris Rock took the stage at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre for his highly anticipated Netflix stand-up special, Selective Outrage. The show was broadcast live from the venue just weeks before the one-year anniversary of Will Smith’s infamous slap at the 2022 Academy Awards.
Rock has been touring and workshopping new material, including references to the slap, for much of the past year. Selective Outrage was a culmination of that work. He didn’t hold back in his jokes about Will, from chuckling that he watched Emancipation to see the actor get whipped to taking shots at his unconventional marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith, including her “entanglement” with August Alsina that made headlines in 2020.
“His wife was f**king her son’s friend,” the Good Hair star stated plainly of Jada’s extramarital relationship. According to Billboard, the two met back in 2015 at a music festival where she and Will’s children, Willow and Jaden Smith, were featured performers.
“Now, I normally would not talk about this s**t. But for some reason, [they] put that s**t on the internet,” Rock continued. “I have no idea why two talented people would do something that lowdown.”
Alsina claimed in a June 2020 interview on “The Breakfast Club” that Will knew about the singer’s ties to his wife and gave their relationship his “blessing.” Jada told her side of the entanglement story in a July episode of “Red Table Talk,” explaining that it happened while she and Will were amicably separated.
Rock, for his part, made light of the situation. “We all been cheated on. Everybody in here’s been cheated on,” he said in his stand-up set. “None of us have ever been interviewed by the person that cheated on us on television. ‘Hey, I was sucking somebody’s d**k. How did that make you feel?'”
The Madagascar voice actor shared that he called Will to offer his “condolences” after the entanglement drama, but he didn’t pick up the phone. He quipped that the King Richard performer had already experienced enough pain. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me, OK?” the comedian joked. “Everybody in the world called him a b**ch… They called his wife a predator. And who does he hit? Me. A n**ga he knows he can beat. That is some b**ch a** s**t.”