You’ll laugh even as you’re offended by Chris Rock’s live Netflix special ‘Selective Outrage.’
Chris Rock took to the ether Saturday night for “Selective Outrage,” the second of two stand-up specials for which Netflix paid $40 million: an event whose specialness, not to say its costliness, was emphasized by bracketing it within a pre-show and an after-show, and by putting it out live.
(West Coast viewers got Rock a little on the early side, at 7 p.m.; back East — where the show took place, at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre — a little on the late; the rest of the world — the show streamed to 90 countries — made its own accommodations.)
Had “Selective Outrage” not gone out live, a fact that Netflix could not emphasize too much, it would have been news — as indeed it had been successfully sold as such for weeks before its arrival — given that Rock was expected to address the Slap, whose first anniversary is nigh. (If you are the one person who somehow does not know, at last year’s Oscars ceremony, Will Smith attacked Rock over a bad joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith — though Rock has his own theory about that, see below.) This contretemps has refused to evaporate, perhaps exactly because the world was waiting for Rock to address it.
Outside of news and sports and awards ceremonies, live television has been something of an affectation since the 1950s: a stunt, a gimmick, occasionally an aesthetic experiment. This is Rock’s sixth special, and that the previous five were produced in the usual manner has proved no impediment to his career.
And as in a sporting event, there was an element of unpredictability to “Selective Outrage,” even of danger, the possibility that the comedian would have to be carried off the field, figuratively speaking. (The potential for bombing is so much a part of the fabric of “Saturday Night Live,” created to put a countercultural spin on the comedy-variety shows of the ‘50s, that it has survived for nearly 60 years with a remarkably high percentage of dud bits; fans show up as they might for a team that often loses.)
The sports metaphor was underscored by the pre- and post-game analysis, as it were; by a credit sequence in which the star seemed to be girding himself for battle, not just with audience expectations and with the specter of his Oscar attacker, but, as he walked in slow motion toward the stage past echoes of earlier specials, with himself as well — and by the triumphal pose he struck at the end, stern-faced, looking not happy but vindicated.
