A Little Mayhem
Were I the sort to mirror the solipsistic "everything is about me" worldview of today's pampered and privileged elites, influencers, woke-arbiters, SJ warriors, community activists and Hollywood narcissists, I'd conclude that actor Will Smith read Sunday's blog post about offensensitivity…
and totally missed its message.
Smith, as many of you know, took such (delayed - he laughed at first) umbrage at Chris Rock's joke about his wife's baldness (Jada Pinkett-Smith has alopecia) during Rock's presentation of the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature that he strode up to Rock, smacked him across the face, and strutted back to his seat with a smug little smirk on his face.
Rock, to his credit, didn't cower. Continuing to smile, Rock informed the world that,
Will Smith just bitch-slapped me.
Smith jawed at Rock from his seat afterwards, yelling,
Keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth.
To which Rock offered,
That was the greatest night in the history of television.
Soon thereafter, Smith was... consoled? talked down? advised? comforted? granted absolution? by fellow nine-figure types Denzel Washington and Tyler Perry.
Smith, offered up a public apology, tears and all, when he won Best Actor later that night.
But not to Rock.
Instead, we got some self-indulgent crap about the price of fame and fortune:
In this business you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you, and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that's OK.
Welcome to the real world, Will.
There is some history between Rock and the Smiths. In 2016, Rock, hosting the Oscars, poked fun at Jada Pinkett Smith's boycotting the event:
Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited!
Too bad - Smith was out of line.
There are two realities about comedy.
First - comedians are, far above all else, trying to get a laugh. It's their job, it's what keeps them going. Not everything works, even for the best, but it's always about the laugh.
Second, most jokes will offend someone. If you're named Todd or Blake or Blair or Blaine or Brent, you might be put out by George Carlin's classic bit on boys' names, but that's how it goes. Yes, Rock's joke was aimed right at Pinkett Smith, but that's how it goes. Will is right - public figures will be poked at. It's part of the price of fame - fame that has made them a fortune and drawn the Smiths a combined seventy-one million Instagram followers.
Smith, I'm sure, is being lauded by many for standing up for his wife. In a different setting, we might feel some empathy. A professional comedian, being paid to garner desperately needed laughs, making a somewhat tasteless but rather soft
Jada, I love ya. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it
joke at the expense of a coutured 0.1%er at the center of the glammest of glam events, deserves none such.
Nevertheless, apologists and excusers took to that broadcaster of society's id - Twitter.
Fortunately, there were many who denounced Smith's violence.
I fear, though, that Craig Seymour and others who share his view on this incident won't realize that this is a product of the normalization of the nonexistent "right to be offended" that is at the heart of today's cancel culture and bizarro-world woke thinking, where words are violence, but violence sometimes isn't.
Whatever you think about Rock's joke, a physical assault was not an acceptable response. Beyond the danger that average folks possibly considering this as justification to storm the stage at a comedy club, there's the broader message, as one Tweeter offered:
No. Not in this setting and these circumstances. This isn't some Road House honkytonk, where there’s a tacit understanding that trash talk can result in thrown hands. Nor is it a mosh pit, or skateboard park, or jungle gym, with their concomitant assumptions of risk.
Offended-ness cannot be allowed to normalize. We cannot have a functioning society where someone gets to escalate their personal objections to someone else's words to aggression. That goes not just for violence, but for intimidation and cancellation as well.
Fortunately, it does seem that Smith is being denounced more than applauded. The memes are already out.
Maybe there's yet hope for our society.
I offer, as a coda (CODA won Best Picture - see what I did there?), a few words penned by Lzzy Hale of Halestorm:
A little mayhem never hurt anyone
I'ma gonna get some, get some, get some
A little bedlam 'til I'm coming undone
I'ma gonna get some, get some, get some
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.