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IF YOU'RE SLAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT

The Good, Bad And Outright Bewildering Reactions To Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock At The Oscars

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
The Good, Bad And Outright Bewildering Reactions To Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock At The Oscars
By now you have almost certainly seen footage of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in the face at the Oscars, in response to a joke Rock made about Jada Pinkett Smith. But you may not yet have seen all the tweets about it.
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It seems like every year I decide to sit out the Oscars, or otherwise start watching and then tune out, that’s exactly when something eventful happens. In 2017, it was the “Moonlight”/“La La Land” Best Picture mixup; last year it was Glenn Close doing “Da Butt”.



This year, it was Will Smith walking purposefully up to Chris Rock and slapping him — hard, from the look of it — following Rock making a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s baldness.



Pinkett Smith was diagnosed with alopecia in 2018, a condition that causes hair loss. In July 2021, she made the decision to shave her head, saying, “It was time to let go.”



Though Pinkett Smith has spoken publicly about having alopecia, it seems intuitive that someone else’s medical condition isn’t something to make jokes about, unless you’re really, really, really sure they’re cool with it. But by Pinkett Smith’s reaction to Rock’s joke — an eye roll and a head shake — it seems like it was not, in fact, cool.

Will Smith drove this point home by walking up to the stage to, uh, sucker-slap Rock in the face.

First off, the reactions from the celebrities in attendance at the Oscars were incredible:



Once Smith had sat back down, he proceeded to shout — twice — “Keep my wife’s name out your f*cking mouth.” It was bleeped on TV in the US, but fortunately, not everywhere.



This is the kind of moment Twitter lives for.



Following the altercation, the takes came fast and, in some cases, furious, as some people condemned Smith for the act of violence and others cheered him on.

In the realm of condemnation, Judd Apatow claimed in a since-deleted tweet that Smith’s punch “could have killed” Rock:



To which most people responded: first of all no, and second of all, lol.



The timeline saw more tweets that took the event as seriously as Apatow did:



People also immediately began anticipating the media and cultural fallout from the whole thing:



But we also saw a ton of just plain great tweets about the whole thing:


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