Well, we’ve had two weeks to digest Will Smith’s slap heard round and the resulting fallout. Smith has had a number of high profile projects paused and he’s been banned from both the Oscars and any other events the Academy Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences holds for the next ten years (he resigned his membership before the Academy could stripped it from him). Yet people are still fighting about it online, so it looks like we’re not completely over it yet (are we ever?).
This isn’t another ethical play by play, talking about who was right and who was wrong and what the cultural implications are and blah blah blah. There’s plenty of that everywhere else and nothing anyone anywhere says is going to change anyone else’s mind by this point. It’s all just clickbait and white noise.
Rather this is a look from an angle that has been ignored so far. Namely from the possible point of view of comedians in general. And maybe why it’s time people in the funny business should abandon the Oscars altogether.
Let’s agree right off the bat that if an action star like Dwayne Johnson or Jason Mamoa or Jason Statham had made that exact same joke in the exact same place at the exact dame time, Smith’s ass doesn’t budge a single inch out his seat. The only reason he got up on stage and slapped another man in the face was because said man was a comedian considerably smaller than him. If he isn’t a comic (and smaller), Smith does nothing but keep laughing at the joke in question.
Regardless of what you might think, comedy isn’t easy. The road to box office Hell is paved with actors who tried to be funny and failed completely. Plenty of action stars have tried their hands at comedy and admitted that making people funny is harder than knife fighting and dodging explosions. Jerry Seinfeld once said that during the height of his popularity in the 1990’s, when he was introduced at a comedy festival as “the greatest comedian in the world,” he could feel the audience pull back and become unresponsive. Become hostile. It was as though they had been challenged by his introduction and people who paid to be entertained made the conscious decision not to laugh.
And the comedy gig these days is a sword just waiting to cut you down. Every time a comic takes the stage, a depressingly large portion of the audience is lying in wait with their phones at the ready and their fingers hovering over the send button. If you’re a comedian these days, half the world will be looking for an excuse to label you a racist/sexist/ableist/homophobic/transphobic thought criminal while the other half is just itching to brand you a woke libtard snowflake and everyone is trying to your reduce your carer to smouldering ashes. It’s why a lot of comics refuse to perform on college campuses.
The danger isn’t just restricted to the stage and social media either. Christopher Titus began studying karate (he’s a black belt) because of physical altercations he had with people after his shows. Actress Kris Carr recently admitted that she stopped doing stand up because of people stalking, harassing and threatening after she got off stage. The heckling doesn’t stop after you leave the stage and the club doesn’t protect you once you’re out the door.
(This in no way excuses the genuinely deliberate cruelty some comedians are guilty of. But there are ways to address grievances without beating someone up in the parking lot and physical danger seems to be a more common occupational hazard for comedians than we knew pre-SmithSlap.)
And let’s not kid ourselves, hosting the Oscars is easily the most thankless and toughest job in the entertainment world right now. While everyone loves to crow about the show’s declining ratings, the Oscars are the most talked about thing around the planet’s water coolers the following morning. And even during the Oscar’s current ratings lull, you can bet that close to a billion eyeballs across the globe were glued to their TV or computer screens during the broadcast. That says nothing of the millions of Youtube views the show gets in the days afterward. Everyone is talking about who won, who got snubbed, who was wearing what, who said what and who was or wasn’t included in the annual Memoriam (seriously Academy, you couldn’t have found a spot for Bob Saget this year?). It’s Twitter’s busiest night of the year.
In case you have any doubt, The SmithSlap trended on Twitter almost every second for a week despite the fact Russia is committing war crimes and we’re still in a pandemic. People may claim to hate the Oscars but they remain desperately obsessed with them.
And one of the things people love to hate the most is whoever is unfortunate enough to be the host. Most times it’s a comedian (or in some cases comedians) and no matter the tone of their humour or the subjects of their jokes, people crucify them every year, often claiming they were the weakest thing about the show.
We want our comedians edgy and topical and then throw them to the wolves when they are, labelling them mean bullies. When we decide we want their humour to be mild and inoffensive we label them boring and bland when they accommodate us (ask Jimmy Kimmel). If you’re a comedian at the Oscars, you are never going to win and your life is going to suck.
(And seriously, you put a bunch of comics who make their livings cracking jokes about celebrities into a building full of celebrities for three hours and are surprised when someone makes a joke at someone else’s expense? What did everyone think was going to happen?)
But the SmithSlap added a new wrinkle. Comedians everywhere took to social media denounce Smith the moment he introduced his hand to Chris Rock’s face. It’s the first time in recorded history Tim Allen and Kathy Griffin have ever agreed on anything. And they weren’t just pissed at the slap itself, but the Academy’s inaction following it (this was before we knew that they tried to get Smith to leave) and perhaps more importantly, the standing ovation Smith got just minutes later as he accepted his Oscar for Best Actor.
The attacker was being applauded and checked up on (the list of names that rushed over to console Smith following the Slap read like the IMDB page for a, well you know, an Oscar winning movie). None of that mentions the tsunami of support Will and wife Jada got from people on Twitter and other social media. Make no mistake, Rock had his defenders and supporters as well, but if you were a comedian, odds are you were more than a little disheartened by the mainstream support a man who slapped a comic over a joke was getting.
And the excuses that were being made for him.
Again, this isn’t an ethical examination of what happened and why. At this point that’s just pointlessly regurgitating what a million other people have said a million times already. But imagine you’re a firefighter and you see someone in a crowd of onlookers slap another firefighter for spraying water on a house (even though spraying water on burning houses is what they’re paid to do). And not only does the person who did the slapping not face any apparent consequences, but a bunch of onlookers ignore the firefighter and rush over to check on the slapper. And then they give the slap happy onlooker a standing ovation minutes later.
No matter what caused the slap, your professional pride as a firefighter is going to be more than a little wounded and you’re going to be more than a little pissed off.
Will Smith proved that most of Hollywood doesn’t care about you unless you’re one of their own. It’s an attitude the Academy echoed with it’s timid handling of the situation. They want comedians to entertain everyone on their biggest night and then pull a Houdini when things go sideways. So maybe it’s time for comics to give Hollywood the middle finger salute.
When the string pullers responsible for putting together next year’s Oscars start calling around to find a host, maybe any comedian that answers the phone politely says “no thanks” before hanging up. And then wish the Academy best of luck in their future endeavours and suggest they call Jake Paul or Joss Whedon and see how well they make funny on live television. After all, they’re both looking for paying gigs right now and if anyone slaps Paul, well he’s always looking for a fight.
Two weeks ago, Hollywood (and a lot of fans) essentially abandoned comedians. Maybe it’s time comedians abandoned them right back.
Image via www.metro.co.uk
