Rock’s Edgy Jokes Came For The Jugular

Chris Rock recently made history by being the first live streamed comedy special on Netflix. His special, “Selective Outrage,” gave him an opportunity to joke about the state of America, spoiling his kids, abortions, and the Kardashians for some reason. The real kicker came in the last 10 minutes when he fully addressed what happened at the Oscars. He completely went in on both Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, going as far as calling Pinkett Smith a bitch.

“Selective Outrage” was a pretty good special. It got a couple gut wrenching laughs out of me. I can see people not finding this special funny for a bunch of reasons though. One of them being that some of his jokes tended to have a pretty long build up with some underwhelming payoff. Rock had a tendency of going on long tangents with no punchline that resulted in him getting more applause than laughs at times. Even though not every single joke landed, the show was still a decent special. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still funny but nothing particularly hilarious.

I loved the social commentary from Rock in this special. His commentary about people practicing selective outrage was especially interesting. Which brings me to his comments about the Smith incident. He stated that Smith practices selective outrage by only getting mad at him and not literally everybody else. He went on a tangent about it making some petty jokes, including a joke about Smith going on Red Table Talk with Pinkett Smith. He did fumble at the end that resulted in me cringing pretty hard, and you can tell he was frantically trying to recover. The craziest part was him calling Pinkett Smith out her name; it wasn’t even in a funny joke he just said it. Raw. I´m not saying it´s uncalled for but he could’ve done better.

“Selective Outrage” was overall a pretty decent comedy special, and I got a couple of really good laughs out of it. I like the topics he discusses and the takes he presented, but for his next special he should switch up the style at least a little bit. You should definitely go watch it and form your own opinions, because it’s definitely enjoyable.

By Gary Langfield Jr., Senior, The Noble Academy

Instagram: @ima_menaace18

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